Born in Enniskillen in 1952, Jeremy Henderson began his studies at the University of Ulster before moving to Kingston University, (where he was awarded the first Picker Fellowship). Later he completed a postgraduate M.A. in Painting at Chelsea School of Art. Between 1979 – 1993 he lived and worked in London and then returned to Northern Ireland, setting up a studio in Fermanagh.

Throughout his career Henderson has exhibited in many group shows in London, New York, Dublin and Belfast. His work first came to prominence in 1980 when his paintings were selected by the critic Cyril Barrett for ‘The International Connection’, a survey of Irish art of the 1970s shown at the Roundhouse Gallery, London.

Henderson’s work is held in many private and public collections in Britain and Ireland including The Office of Public Works, Dublin; The Department of the Environment, Belfast; The John Hewitt Foundation; Queen’s University, Belfast; The Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Fermanagh County Museum; Jefferson Smurfit plc; The Ferguson Collection; Waterford Crystal plc; Freshfields; Cable and Wireless plc; and Diageo UK.

By the mid 1980s, Henderson’s work had evolved from formal abstractions into landscape-based paintings. John Hutchinson, director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, writing in the Sunday Independent, makes this observation about Henderson’s work: -

….’his images deliberately evoke the picturesque and romantic landscape conventions that originated in the late eighteenth century (and had great currency in Ireland), as well as the expressionist subjectivity of painters such as Jack B Yeats’.

Ted Hickey, former keeper of art at the Ulster Museum, in his introduction to the 1986 exhibition in Enniskillen also makes the comparison with Yeats. He sees Henderson’s treatment of landscape as ‘essentially emotional and concerned with ideas about the nature of art and intended to stimulate and provoke rather than reassure’. He quotes Henderson’s words ‘These paintings show expansive vistas of no identifiable place but an amalgamation of images from memory which are not intended to be interpreted as the fashionable mythological view of landscape, no arcadia or world of sagas’.

Today Henderson described his work as having come ‘full circle towards an internalised organic abstraction which characterised my more intuitive approach until the early eighties’.

Henderson’s move to rural Fermanagh has resulted in paintings in which elements of landscape and representational forms emerge from richly coloured canvases, work which can be understood and appreciated on many levels.