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“Conversation Galante” (Group)
Pilar Corrias, London
January 16  - February 24, 2024

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present across both its gallery spaces Conversation Galante, a group exhibition of new and recent works by Nina Chanel Abney, Ana Benaroya, Katherine Bradford, France-Lise McGurn, Sofia Mitsola, GaHee Park, Henning Strassburger, and Didier William.

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“MAI 2023”
Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
April 9  - June 10, 2023

Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to present Henning Strassburger’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. In his new paintings, Strassburger seems to abandon abstraction in favor of the human body, one of the main interests of figurative art. And yet the images show bodies under water, in the shower and in the swimming pool, slowly blurring the boundary between the body and its environment.

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Henning Strassburger &
Andy Hope 1930
JUBG Space, Cologne
Record Release with Eric D. Clark
November – December 2022

When Henning Strassburger was a child, back in the 1990s, he sat at home in front of the TV. “I am one hundred percent generation music television. To me, music and image, music and video are inseparable”, says the now 39-year-old, laughing. That’s one of the reasons why Strassburger has been keen to exhibit at JUBG, and when people say that his art examines the possibilities of classical / analog painting in a society flooded with digital imagery, it’s not just Instagram or TikTok that comes to mind, but rather about 100,000 videos the painter binged on in his youth. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would be a teenager in socks in the parental living room, watching MTV with reheated food on his lap. Smells Like Teen Spirit. The self-portraits as a pimply Justin Bieber, an aging Las Vegas star, or Pete Doherty are distant reminiscences of it, simultaneously illustrating the distance that these things have to him today. Bieber wasn’t even born when Strassburger watched music videos in Meißen.

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“Oh Bad Boy”
Foundry, Seoul
June 11 - July 25, 2021

FOUNDRY SEOUL presented ‘OH BAD BOY’, the first Korean solo exhibition by Henning Strassburger. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition featured 23 paintings, a spatial installation, and a large-scale site-specific wall painting. Strassburger works within pop culture and image culture, focusing on the relationship between images produced by contemporary painting and the superabundant images created by our era, thereby seeking new possibilities for painting.

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“DIE UNSCHULDIGEN II”
Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
October 9 - November 13, 2021

Drips, flecks and letters, brushstrokes and splashes have defined Henning Strassburger’s recognizable paintings so far. His large-scale canvases might have resembled messy explosions at first but revealed twisted grids populated by deliberately placed pictorial elements at closer examination. For Die Unschuldigen II, his second solo show with the gallery, 
Henning’s paintings take a different approach.
The task of figuration that the genre of portrait seems to pose might appear like a weird choice for a painter who dedicated his work toward investigating the potentials of abstract painting in today’s digital culture. And yet, as Henning’s friends appear on canvases in roles of body builders, Berlin stereotypes and pissed hip hoppers, the idea of these individuals, their autonomy and authenticity, becomes just as abstract.
In these new works, imagined boundaries between the model’s identity as a complex of social forces and its creation inside an artwork fall flat. As John Berger famously put it in his Changing View of Man in Portrait, “every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.” In Henning’s world of carefully calculated grids, these faces emerge more as images of a time than as images of people, as he turns his friends into elements of his pictorial universe.

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