Veteran sound artist Douglas Henderson’s 2nd solo exhibition at Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin -after “Dukatenscheißer” in 2009 - explores the parallels of unlikely protagonists: poets and superheroes.The superhero rescues the world with grand gestures, while the poet restores the soul with intimate understanding. These are the complementary actors lined up to save us in our perilous, crisis-fed existence.

Originally trained in classical and electroacoustic composition, Henderson was attracted from the start by the relation of sound to other media. At first he worked like so many others in dance, before beginning to inquire after less common connections. Henderson was particularly interested in the fact that sound not only appears auditively but can, by its very nature, also adopt corporeal, spatial and visual forms; that sound, through its physical properties, manifests itself in different media and thus exists as a genuine media hybrid: as wave patterns in liquids, pressure conditions in air and kinetic energy in responsive materials. This synergetic dimension has been inscribed in various ways in Henderson’s SoundArt works ever since; and it is precisely from the close interrelation between the sonic and the non-sonic that his works take shape. The sensory fusion between sound, form, colour, and space-design, infused with Henderson’s idiosyncratic humour, acts as a potent catalyst for the synaesthetic experience of his works. With its particular blending of the sensual and the abstract, Douglas Henderson’s works add their own idiosyncratic nuances to the rich palette of SoundArt.

Douglas Henderson was born in 1960 in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied music composition and theory receiving his PhD. in composition from Princeton University in 1991. He recently chaired the Sound Arts Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and conducts master classes in electroacoustic composition, multi-channel audio and recording arts.
In 2012 he has been invited to major museum exhibitions such as “Asche und Gold. Eine Weltenreise” at MARTa in Herford, “Sound Art. Klang als Medium der Kunst” at ZKM in Karlsruhe and “City Sonic Festival” in Belgium. He has been awarded a 2008 Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Program Award for Music for 100 Carpenters (2009), a 2007 DAAD artist residency in Berlin, and a 2007 Foundation for ContemporaryArts individual artist grant. He was a 2002 and 2006 artist in residence at Harvestworks Digital Media Lab, a 2004 Dance Theater Workshop ARM Fellow, and a 2005 guest artist for Resonance Magazine (London). He received a 2005 Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Program Award for work with choreographer Luis Lara Malvacías, and the New York Dance and Performance Award ("Bessie") for his work on Kriyas (1998).

Vernissage: Friday March 9th at 7pm
Opening Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12 pm - 6 pm

Galerie Mario Mazzoli
Potsdamer Str. 132, 10783 Berlin
http://www.galeriemazzoli.com  
info@galeriemazzoli.com