Finnish-born, Paris-based painter Henni Alftan is the recipient of the 2021 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency at Tamarind. Alftan is relatively new to collaborative printmaking and the extended residency provided the opportunity to explore the unique qualities of lithography. The three elegant prints she created during her residency explore ideas of time, movement, simultaneity, transparency, and the essential language of ink on paper.

Alftan is an accomplished painter who draws upon the inherent tension of a fragmented narrative. Her deliberately spare compositions emphasize the artificiality of painting and its materiality, as rendered through exquisite details of physical form and texture. Much of her work centers on domestic space and everyday life, yet her tightly framed figurative subjects are defined through equal measures of exacting description and abstraction.

Henni received her MFA in 2004 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. She has participated in international exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Milan, Helsinki, Seoul, and Vancouver. Her work is represented in numerous museum collections including Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; McEvoy Foundation for The Arts, San Francisco; JNBY Art Center, Shanghai, China; and Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland. Alftan is represented by Karma in New York.

Support provided by Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.

Tamarind Talks: Henni Alftan

Recorded on December 7, 2021 from 516 Arts, this artist talk was hosted by Tamarind Institute. Support provided by Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.