How Aussie artist Cj Hendry is flipping the art world on its head (2024)

After spending months drawing, scrunching up and then drawing again six famous Andy Warhol portraits last year, artist Cj Hendry told her 350,000-plus Instagram fans the drawings would be printed on T-shirts, which would be available for purchase.

Fans practically had their credit cards at the ready, but there was a problem: a production issue meant the entire project had to be scrapped.

"I was like, 'Oh my God, I’m an idiot'," says New York-based Hendry. "I went white, got a bit panicky, and then I was like, 'OK, let's throw them away creatively'."

Hendry and her team packed up the shirts, painted the boxes red and marked them "trash only". What followed was a mad scavenger hunt around New York, as Hendry dumped the boxes in random spots, giving fans on Instagram clues where to find them. Within moments of sharing a post, 50-plus people would pounce, grabbing what they could.

"People asked, 'Did you plan that?' she laughs now. "Are you kidding? You think I wanted to lose money?"

For 31-year-old Hendry, who was born in South Africa (she can do a perfect accent on cue) and raised in Brisbane, obstacles in her work are nothing new; in fact, she says, roadblocks are a constant.

But on Instagram, where she first shot to fame in 2013 for her hyper-realistic black-and-white pen drawings, it looks like it all comes together seamlessly. Kanye West owns one of her pieces; she collaborated with shoe designer Christian Louboutin in 2017; her last major exhibition, Monochrome, had queues around the block in New York for days; her work fetches up to $250,000 per piece; the list goes on. Her success has been nothing short of staggering.

What Hendry says she doesn't publicise is how much hard work goes into what she does, and how often it goes wrong.

"That’s the [thing] about social media. I'll show you the final idea without showing you all the months we spent going down the wrong path," she says.

Arriving at her latest effort, a solo exhibition titled Rorschach, after the psychological test, was an exercise in patience and resilience. Before it came together, Hendry and her team, including studio director Elsa Picone, had worked for many months on a different idea involving projection mapping, before realising it was too complicated.

Switching gears, she focused on Rorschach, a series of squish paintings hand-drawn by Hendry and displayed in an enormous, custom-made, all-white jumping castle shaped to look like a psych ward, installed in a 280-square metre space in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

It took more than a year for Hendry's exhibition concept to come together - with months spent trying to find someone to build the psych ward - and the response has been typically huge, with people streaming in to have a bounce since it opened on April 10. But Hendry says the feedback hasn't been entirely positive.

"There are two aspects: the general population, which are most of the people on Instagram, and then there’s the art world," Hendry says. "The art world has its hesitations."

To her detractors, Hendry's playful take on such a serious matter - psychological health - was disrespectful. "To that point, I think there are ways to talk about serious topics in a lighthearted way," she says. "I think everyone has dealt with something or is dealing with something; it's nice to be able to come into a space that's quite light-hearted."

Hendry's interactive, experience-driven work and social media fame causes her to raise a few eyebrows in the traditional art world, with a recent New York Times profile suggesting she was trying to find a way to fit in. In reality, that couldn't be further from the truth.

"[The profile] was a great opportunity and I'm very grateful but I think the people who know what I do - everyone was just like, 'What is this?' I'm like, 'Damn straight, what is this?' It's ridiculous," she says with a laugh.

"It's such a different audience, they're catering to the fossils. Our age group is so fascinated by different things, and fascinated by disruptors."

It'd be easy to pin the "disruptor" tag on Hendry, but at the same time it's difficult to put a label on her work at all.

"I'm not trying to be this or that, I’m just trying to do the best I can and if people want to call me that, I'm like, 'Go for it mate, I don’t give a f---'," she says. "I am a little bit naive, because I haven’t come from the art world. I’m a kid without a degree who is really hungry to create something.

"I’m not following an art world path, I’m just kind of doing my own thing in the corner, and the art world is looking over."