Henning Kles’s paintings belong to the artistic tradition of dream representation. Images of urban street life point towards Kles’s interest in the darker aspects of the human psyche and the horrendous and incredible madness of everyday life. The mysterious and grotesque are placed at the center of his works, with particular attention devoted to fin-de-siècle symbolism. Kles’s paintings reveal connections to the symbolist paintings of the 19th-century not only in terms of subject and choice of color, but also in regards to compositional devices. His arrangements recall the phantasmagoria works of Gustave Moreau, James Ensor, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch.

In his paintings, Kles combines the traditional formal language of art history with contemporary imagery. His visual narratives are culled from movies, newspaper photographs, magazines and comics. Kles’s pirates, outlaws, renegades and sheriffs represent, and perhaps even challenge, our conventional moral ideas of good and evil. Social conundrums regarding the perception of authority and trust become apparent in Kles’s work.

With “Harvester of Heröes,” Kles has been influenced by The Watchmen, the DC Comics’s 1980s cult classic graphic novel. In The Watchmen, American citizens appear as costumed characters who face the threat of war. In both Kles’s works and The Watchmen, ordinary people are presented as superheroes who must confront larger moral issues and struggle with their personal failings in a world that is simultaneously believable and unfamiliar.