
Contemporary Artist
Henriette
Dedichen — Contemporary Artist

Contemporary Artist

Contemporary Artist

Contemporary Artist
Portfolio

Egg tempera on Arches cotton paper, 101.6 x 152.4 cm


Triptych, Egg tempera on Arches cotton paper, 152.4 x 304.5 cm



Egg tempera on Arches cotton paper, 101.6 x 152.4 cm


Egg tempera on Arches cotton paper, 152.4 x 304.5 cm




Artist Statement
Through ancient materials I search for what holds life together —the tension between the visible and the felt,between the beauty we compose and the vulnerability we carry —believing that art's power lies not in resolving this tensionbut in making it luminous.
— Henriette Dedichen
About the Artist

Through ancient materials I search for what holds life together — the tension between the visible and the felt, between the beauty we compose and the vulnerability we carry — believing that art's power lies not in resolving this tension but in making it luminous.
The technique is egg tempera with hand-ground mineral pigments — a practice that connects physically to the earth and to artists who have used these same materials for millennia. Each layer must dry before the next is applied. The surface is matte yet radiant, fragile yet enduring. In ceramic, the same investigation continues: clay shaped by hand, transformed by fire, glazed in colors that pool and run according to gravity and heat rather than the artist's complete control.
The work moves between registers that most artists choose between. Monumental landscapes of the Engadine — the mountains I live among and love — painted repeatedly in modes ranging from geological precision to near-abstraction, searching for what no single painting can capture. Lifeguards at swimming pools, composed and watchful, holding the line between safety and catastrophe — figures whose calm surfaces conceal the weight of decisions that concern life and death. Ceramic beings stripped of limbs and social legibility, reduced to the central nervous system, revealing how fragile and how strange we are beneath what we present to the world. A rose that hangs not from lack of water but from lack of love. And dots — pure concentric circles of color on concrete walls — because joy is not a lesser register but an equal one.
Five series. Five questions. What does it mean to decide? What are we when everything is stripped away? What happens when what is needed cannot be seen or measured? How do you paint what you see every day and love beyond words? And can color alone be reason enough?
I paint with the oldest medium because I believe that what connects us across time is not what changes but what persists — the body's vulnerability, the mountain's indifference, the circle's perfection, and the endless human negotiation between the surface we compose and the life we carry beneath it.