JUBG Space, Cologne
Record Release with Eric D. Clark

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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