Henning StrassburgerMai 2023

FEEL GOOD – Dana Žaja: In preparation for this conversation I read texts on your paintings and came across this sentence from the catalogue for your first exhibition with us: “Strassburger integrates found material from reality as part of a specific present moment. Everything is recorded, disparate things are connected and written on: existential fear, fun culture, and the fulfilment of desire.” As I was thinking about it, my first question was what reality actually means to you?
Henning Strassburger: “Existential fear, fun culture and the fulfilment of desire” – I rather like that. It hardly gets more real than that. But I would not exactly see myself as an expert in the interpretation of reality.
DZ: In your notes on painting you write about abstraction: “The perfect abstract picture is achieved when it has become wallpaper.” Do you mean that negatively? Then why did you paint abstractly for so long? And why no longer?
HS: I reached wallpaper status last year, and I say that with a good deal of satisfaction. Mission accomplished. But my appetite for carrying on with it as trademark art and a safe cash cow was really rather limited. I have colleagues who are better at that and who run it as a big business. I wanted to head back out into the adventure. Into what is for now the last abstract painting I put everything I have got, and then shut the lid on it for myself. Because I really have no desire to paint the same picture every day.
DZ: Your obsession with pools and splashes now takes on a melancholy touch in its figurative instance, which in turn is broken by the palette so typical of you.
HS: I enjoy working my way through the subject, there is a great deal in it. Now I am adding the figure as a further problem. I have the feeling that it is looking critically at my painting at the same time as I am painting it. Perhaps shaking its head, who knows. I can confront the figures with a painting towards which they have to take a position. One before which they may also buckle a little, or by which they are overwhelmed. In any case it gives me room to manoeuvre in which I can open up this can of worms. With the abstract paintings I had exhausted that for myself.
DZ: “As long as humanity can see, there will also be painting.” On the one hand it seems as if you wanted viewers to see themselves in your paintings, or to immerse themselves in them. On the other hand you often mix your colours with white so that the paintings remain flat. Is it important to you that a painting be perceived in its mediality? Or are they meant rather to trigger self-reflection in the viewer?
HS: That sounds super esoteric. But of course, the aim of painting should be that somebody actually looks at it. And flatness is the domain of painting, because, conservatively speaking, it takes place on a surface. You can immerse yourself in something in a video installation or in participatory entertainment art as well. But when you stand in front of painting, it always knocks on the brain synapse that tells you: PICTURE! That could be seen as a lack of complexity, but in truth it is precisely this shortcoming that makes it what it is. (Excerpts from the interview)

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin: 28/4 – 17/6/2023