Dalí Reimagined: Bottle Cap Portrait

Henning Leuschner, Germany

Henning Leuschner was born in 1968 in the Sauerland and has lived in Cologne since 1989. Before working as a visual and freelance artist, the trained social worker worked since 1996 as a department head in youth welfare at the LVR, as facility manager of an independent youth welfare provider and as a freelance systemic supervisor, coach and organizational developer in the Rhineland. Since he began his artistic activity, his artistic work has included portraits, still lifes, landscapes and city impressions made from used bottle caps. As a passionate music lover and world traveler, he finds his inspiration at concerts/music festivals and while traveling. The autodidact's art was created in 2013 during a garden party - so the artist did not come to art, but rather art came to him; many leftover bottle caps resulted in a picture that was ultimately expanded on the garden table and glued together in its perfection. Further experimental art objects followed until it found its perfection in the process of creating the pictures. As an upcycling artist, his works are characterized by the urge to sustainably combine art and life. Henning Leuschner emphatically describes his bottle cap art as a human cultural product and the result of a creative drinking process - an analogue art in a digital age. The starting point of every work of art is an intensive encounter with life events that the artist internalizes and for which he creates a huge collection of motifs from thousands of bottle caps. These seamlessly put together result in a unique work of art with a state of perfection and complete harmony. Henning Leuschner's works do not require any theoretical accompaniment. The overwhelming presence of the works of art does not ask about school or concept. They grab the viewer and make a lasting impression. Changes in light and perspective lead to ever new perceptions. Each of his works of art completes a journey that finds its compressed conclusion in a single scene in which each individual bottle cap has lived its own and individual story during the tasting process. Each picture thus consists of thousands of individual stories that the viewer can only guess at. The works are created in the work studio at Lichtstrasse 46 and this is part of the studio community “Refugium”, located in the heart of Ehrenfeld, the trendy and artistic district of Cologne between Live Music Hall and the Vulkanhalle.