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In the age of social media, Henning Strassburger, who studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 2006 to 2009, explores new perspectives, new approaches regarding habitus, and new formal language rules. In addition to the strong charisma that pop culture quite obviously exudes on his work, one is immediately reminded of the dictum of Jasper Johns (1965) in that illusionist painting no longer needs any pictorial illusionism because it has now become an object itself; after all, the illusionary representation of an object, an actual object, had become obsolete with Pop Art. This is still valid today, albeit under different circumstances, which is why the exhibition organizer Max Dax is presenting the works of Henning Strassburger in the Hamburg exhibition HYPER, also under the aspect that the flood of images on the Internet simulating realism provides an inexhaustible fund of object-like works in the sense of Johns. Accordingly, Henning Strassburger uses the teenage fantasies embodied by net idols as projection surfaces for abstract image motifs: the kiss of two female pop stars on the big stage just as much as the self-invention of a teen star as a tough macho-rapper.
