Henning Strassburger - KARMA MANSION

Henning Strassburger - KARMA MANSION
2 October - 16 November 2019

Blain|Southern is delighted to announce KARMA MANSION, Henning Strassburger’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Appropriated imagery provides the backdrop for new abstract paintings which play with twenty-first century visual culture and image construction.

Strassburger (b.1983 Meissen, Germany) is an artist whose spontaneous aesthetic belies a meticulous and pre-planned practice. His visual language of expressive marks, strokes and recurring motifs appear gestural, but are on closer inspection predetermined. Seemingly unconstrained lines and splashes that don’t overlap but sit neatly in gaps on the canvas, thin, precisely placed brushstrokes: the shape and position of each form is carefully calculated construction. It is this disparity between image and perception, surface and reality that fascinates Strassburger.

The backdrop for the new paintings is a ‘wallpaper’ of photographs that originally featured celebrity couple Justin Bieber and Hayley Baldwin. Both subject to the invasive long lenses of the paparazzi and the objects of digital manipulation by high end fashion magazines, the couple are an example of the hype that surrounds individuals who are promoted like idols or products.

Strassburger lifted pictures of the couple from the internet and made a number of alterations in Photoshop; removing them from the frame and then reconstructing the missing elements to fill the voids. Enlarged and transposed to cover the walls of the gallery, the Lo-Fi reproduction of the bold colours and architectural elements in the photo-mural throw the paintings into sharp relief.

By using appropriated imagery Strassburger explores the relationship between mass media, pop culture and architecture. An age in which our digital selves are experienced by more people than our physical selves raises questions around identity and meaning. KARMA MANSION alludes to the effect that mass media has not just on image construction but also on our material space, blurring the lines between inside and outside, public and private.

About the Artist
Henning Strassburger is also part of HYPER! A Journey into Art and Music, a group exhibitioncurated by Max Daxthat travels to Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands in April 2020.Henning Strassburger (b.1983 Meissen, Germany) deals with themes of media, pop culture and reality in his highly diverse and multi-layered body of work. Painting is the main component of his oeuvre, which also encompasses installation, photo-collage, text and video. Painting with a conceptual and calculating approach, the artist explores how he can work with the new themes, visual language and viewing habits introduced by social mass media. His artistic practice investigates the significance and parameters of contemporary painting, and its scope for raising questions around mass culture, identity and meaning. The artist lives and works in Berlin.

Selected exhibitions include: HYPER! A Journey into Art and Music, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg, DE (2019); Kenny, Blain|Southern, Berlin, DE (2018); M.I.A.E., Städtische Galerie, Gladbeck, DE (2017); Bleaching is Teaching, Kunstverein Reutlingen, DE (2016); My Abstract World, me Collectors Room, Berlin, DE (2016); Think Tank, Kunstverein Oldenburg, DE (2015); What this does, Salon Dahlmann, Berlin, DE (2014); SoftiDrink, Kunstverein Heppenheim, DE (2011); Good Old Figuration, Kunstsammlung Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main, DE (2010)