Henning Strassburger: Die Unschuldigen

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Henning Strassburger, who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2006 to 2009, explores new perspectives, new questions regarding habitus and new formal language rules in the age of social media. In addition to the strong influence that pop culture obviously has on his work, Jasper Johns' dictum (1965) immediately comes to mind that illusionist painting no longer requires pictorial illusionism, as it has now become an object itself; after all, the illusionary representation of an object, a real pictorial object, had become obsolete with pop art. This is still true today under changed conditions, which is why the exhibition organiser Max Dax is presenting Henning Strassburger's works in the Hamburg exhibition HYPER and its most recent variant entitled BLACK ALBUM WHITE CUBE, which can be seen from 20 June at the Kunsthalle Rotterdam, also under the aspect that the flood of images of the WWW that pretend to be realism provides an inexhaustible source of object-like works in Johns' sense. Accordingly, Henning Strassburger uses the teenage fantasies embodied by net idols as projection surfaces for abstract pictorial motifs: the kiss of two female pop stars on the big stage as well as the self-invention of a teenage star as a tough macho rapper.

Exhibition:
CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, 25/6 - 25/7/2020
"Black Ablum White Cube", Kunsthal Rotterdam, 20/6/2020 - 10/1/2021