Featured image: The Safe Distance, Hank Grebe, 2020, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
In these oil paintings, Hank Grebe treats historical figures and philosophical archetypes not as fixed monuments, but as states of mind suspended within landscape.
Hank Grebe is an American painter whose surreal portraits merge history, philosophy, and landscape to explore legacy, introspection, and the inner life of power.
Head of Thomas Jefferson Floats Above Monticello (2024), The Hermit Sage (2025), and Woodrow Wilson: The War Is Over (2024) merge portraiture with symbolic environments, using surreal displacement to examine legacy, introspection, and the quiet after power. Grebe’s work reframes history as something internal, hovering, embedded, or receding, rather than anchored to official narratives.
Head of Thomas Jefferson Floats Above Monticello, Hank Grebe, 2024, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in. / 40.64 x 30.48 cm.
This painting reimagines a canonical American image by lifting Thomas Jefferson’s head from the body and suspending it above Monticello. Based on the famous Rembrandt Peale portrait, the familiar likeness becomes uncanny once detached from physical authority. The softly rendered sky and distant landscape ground the image in pastoral calm, while the floating head suggests Jefferson as an idea, enduring, debated, and unresolved. Grebe’s precise, classical handling heightens the surreal effect, turning reverence into reflection rather than celebration.
The Hermit Sage, Hank Grebe, 2025, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in. / 60.96 x 45.72 cm.
The Hermit Sage shifts from historical portrait to philosophical archetype. A wise, elderly yogi appears embedded within the trunk of a gnarled tree, his face emerging from bark as if grown by time itself. Set in a cold, winter landscape, the scene emphasizes endurance and restraint. The reference to Epictetus frames the figure as one who has mastered inner resilience rather than external control. Earthy tones, careful modeling, and the stark season reinforce the theme of self-discipline as a response to hardship.
Woodrow Wilson: The War Is Over, Hank Grebe, 2024, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in. / 40.64 x 30.48 cm.
In Woodrow Wilson: The War Is Over, Grebe again isolates the head, this time of Woodrow Wilson, floating above a quiet landscape near Staunton, Virginia, Wilson’s birthplace and the artist’s home. Painted to mark the centennial of Wilson’s death, the work observes the end of both life and authority. The subdued palette and distant horizon suggest withdrawal rather than triumph. The title reads less as proclamation than as release, positioning history at the moment it fades into memory.
Across these works, Hank Grebe uses surreal separation, heads from bodies, figures from time, to reconsider how power, wisdom, and identity persist. Landscapes replace institutions; introspection replaces rhetoric. Whether addressing presidents or philosophers, Grebe treats legacy as something that lingers quietly, shaped as much by inner states as by public action. Together, these paintings invite viewers to encounter history not as spectacle, but as a suspended, contemplative presence.
Dancing Bears, Hank Grebe, 2024, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in. / 40.64 x 30.48 cm.