Henning StrassburgerDie Unschuldigen

What’s up … Henning Strassburger, who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2006 to 2009, explores new ways of seeing in the age of social media, new questions concerning habitus and new formal conventions of language. Besides the strong influence that pop culture quite obviously exerts on his work, one is immediately reminded, correspondingly, of Jasper Johns’s dictum of 1965 that illusionistic painting today no longer requires any pictorial illusionism, since it has now become an object itself; for with Pop Art the illusory depiction of an object, of a real pictorial subject, had become obsolete. Under changed conditions this still holds true today, which is why the exhibition maker Max Dax, in the Hamburg exhibition HYPER and its most recent variant under the title BLACK ALBUM WHITE CUBE, on view from 20 June at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, also presents Henning Strassburger’s works from the perspective that the flood of images on the WWW, which feigns realism, provides an inexhaustible fund of object-like works in Johns’s sense. Accordingly, Henning Strassburger uses the teenage fantasies embodied by internet idols as projection surfaces for abstract pictorial motifs: the kiss between two female pop stars on the big stage as much as the self-invention of a teen star as a tough macho rapper.

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 25/6 – 25/7/2020
“Black Album White Cube,” Kunsthal Rotterdam, 20/6/2020 – 10/1/2021