Anton George Henssen

Anton George Henssen

Anton Henssen is a physician scientist and conceptual artist. He studied medicine in Aachen, Düsseldorf and Paris and was a visiting student in the Academy of Art (Kunstakademie) in Düsseldorf. He performed his post-doctoral research fellowship at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where his research was focused on the development of transformative functional genomic technologies to determine the genomic organization and principal molecular lesions driving cancer cells. In his current work as group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and the Charité University Hospital, Anton Henssen’s laboratory focusses on the phenomenon of extrachromosomal circular DNA. His conceptual art is heavily influenced by his work as a cancer geneticist. In his art, Anton Henssen uses DNA as a medium to molecularly stain objects and paintings. In the past, he has collaborated with various conceptual artists such as Pierre Huyghe on projects at the intersection of art and science, eg. “Living / Cancer / Variator” (Palais de Tokyo, 2016). His work was shown in various solo and group exhibitions in New York and Berlin.