Invited to contribute to the Rupf Foundation’s collection at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Henriksen responded with an idea for a site-specific sculpture. Walking around the building with an architectural plan, he soon discovered that some windows seemed to be missing. One of the technicians told him they had covered them up because they had problems with condensation water running down the windows into the space, which became problematic for the conservators. Henriksen thus developed a work, A story about the sun and the moon and the chipboard removed to reveal the pearls of water, 2011, which involved cutting out parts of the wall obscuring the windows. These cut-outs were then used as material for a sculpture, whose size and arrangement echoed the proportions of the exhibition space.

 

The piece was installed next to a work by Georges Braque, engaging with his ideas about the line, the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional space, painting and sculpture, and other Cubistic ideas. The invocation of the relationship of the sun and the moon in the title of Henriksen’s sculpture parallels the way his works interact with the space where they are installed. As he says, ‘you can’t see the moon without the sun, and it’s the same with my sculpture: you can’t see it without the space.’