You’ll know a Bill Henson if you’ve seen one – they’re instantly recognisable by the quality of night he captures so effortlessly, by the cast of pre and mid-pubescent waifs nakedly inhabiting an empty, slightly dystopian landscape, by the drama and the everyday richness.
The beauty of Henson’s work lies often in his ability to heighten the mundane, to add tragic energy to a slender nude or to enrich the quality of night and edginess in a darkened portrait. His dramas are casual, not so distant as to be documentarian but enough to give us a sense he is capturing events just beyond our reality, at the border of dreams – events, however, which may just have happened somewhere in the newly-past night. The sense of these immediacies, these dark happenings, is captured perfectly in the first major retrospective of Henson’s work currently on exhibit at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) and soon to be touring to Victoria.
