Henry Swanson
Henry Swanson (born 1993) is a contemporary artist and oil painter living and working in Brooklyn. His work is deeply inspired by cartoons, comics, and his childhood growing up in Dallas, influences that surface through his playful yet incisive visual language. Swanson works across both two and three dimensional forms, focusing primarily on large-scale oil paintings and mixed media compositions. His works on paper, loosely categorized as such, often combine collage, abstract mark-making, and figurative drawing executed with everyday materials such as BIC pens, boxed crayons, and fluorescent stickers rather than traditional archival tools. A significant source of inspiration comes from current printed media, particularly the daily press, which provides both visual texture and conceptual substance. He embraces the role of craftsman over cultural commentator, allowing formal decisions around color, composition, and visual rhythm to guide his process. Swanson’s work investigates themes of value and perception by contrasting oil painting’s historical prestige with disposable, low-cost materials, creating a dialogue around cultural hierarchy and material worth.
Swanson’s practice is intuitive, spontaneous, and rooted in contradiction. He does not plan his compositions in advance or work from references. Instead, his paintings evolve through successive phases, each stage connecting non sequitur images into a final composition guided by visual harmony rather than narrative logic. Themes of futility, devaluation, and the overlooked are central to his work, often represented through depictions of hand-painted signs, knock-off logos, or other everyday symbols of working-class life. His visual vocabulary draws heavily on the humor and aesthetics of twentieth-century cartoons, using slapstick gestures and deliberate immaturity to address weighty, politically relevant subjects with irony and sincerity. Swanson’s work ultimately aspires to reflect something essential about the human desire to be understood, transforming irreverent or discarded imagery into moments of unexpected emotional resonance and visual delight.
Henry Swanson holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and has participated in several esteemed residency programs, including the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, the At Large Gallery Residency in Brooklyn, and the Goss-Michael Foundation Residency in Dallas. His work has been exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. Notable solo shows include Low Hanging Fruit at Plan X Gallery in Milan, In the Nosebleeds at Ross+Kramer Gallery in New York, and Thorns in the Manger at Anthony Gallery in Chicago. Swanson has also shown work at Expo Chicago, Wadström Tönnheim Gallery in Spain, and Massey Klein Gallery in New York. His group exhibition highlights include Sole Perspective, a collaboration between Nike and Easy Otabor during Art Basel Miami, and What It Could Be at Anthony Gallery.
