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Plan X is pleased to present “Low Hanging Fruit”, the first Italian solo exhibition by Brooklyn- based artist Henry Swanson. Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1993, Swanson holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has exhibited his work both in the United States and internationally.
"Low Hanging Fruit" offers a bold foray into the psychological and emotional terrain of Henry Swanson's imaginative universe, where childhood memories merge with the strange and surreal. Drawing from his Texan upbringing, which was heavily influenced by cartoon culture and comic books, Swanson channels the familiar innocence of childhood toys and characters but subverts them through a lens of distortion, grotesquery, and abstract vulnerability.
The title, Low Hanging Fruit, becomes more than a casual metaphor in this context. Swanson deftly engages with the concept of accessibility in art—not only in its content but in its emotional reach. These are images we recognize, figures we think we know, yet they are twisted and imbued with a sense of discomfort or oddity. Through this distortion, Swanson challenges us to confront our own nostalgia, to grapple with the unsettling aspects of memory that exist beneath the surface of our childhood experiences.
In his series of oil paintings, Swanson manipulates the grotesque and the absurd in his representations of animals, humanoid figures, and objects. The soft yet disconcerting figures evoke an uncanny familiarity, as if childhood comfort objects have been dragged through the subconscious, their innocence tainted yet preserved. Stuffed animals, distorted faces, and toys rendered in painterly abstraction teeter on the edge of being humorous yet unsettling, inviting us to question what lies beneath the “low-hanging” aspects of our cultural and personal memories.
His work "King Muppet Painting", for example, is a figure from a forgotten childhood—offering a visual narrative that speaks to power, absurdity, and the discomfort of looking back at once- cherished symbols of innocence. This is a common thread throughout Swanson's body of work, where humor and fear intermingle, asking us to confront the unresolved emotions of our past.
Swanson’s works inhabit the delicate space between the intimate and the alienating. His approach suggests that vulnerability and accessibility do not equate to simplicity or banality. Instead, he reclaims these ideas as essential to human experience, challenging the viewer to find joy, discomfort, and meaning in the familiar. Low Hanging Fruit ultimately beckons us to rethink our relationship to nostalgia and our tendency to dismiss the easily reached as somehow lesser. In Swanson’s world, the closest fruit may, in fact, be the most profound.

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LOW HANGING FRUIT

Henry Swanson

Plan X Milan
24 October - 24 November 2024