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Henning Strassburger / IMAGE / 10. 09. 2011 - 22. 10. 2011

fiebach, minninger gallery is proud to present IMAGE, a solo exhibition of the Berlin-based artist Henning Strassburger. Playing with the double meaning of image as both a representation or imitation of form and the colloquial understanding as image as one's signature look, Strassburger's exhibition is an inquiry into the paradox of how image is often synonymous with gesture. In the process of developing the exhibition, two key modern artists were mentally present for the artist, namely the American pop artist Roy Lichenstein, whose brushstroke paintings of the mid-60s are iconic in recognizing the brushstroke as an image in itself, and the late 80s New York abstract painter Moira Dryer, whose large scale works, like Strassburger's, often connect the painterly gesture with mammalian subjects like hair or fur. Where in his previous exhibition at the gallery, Happy P. (2009), Strassburger attended to his canvasses with painterly gestures so embellished they could only be understood as being a satire of the vanity of painting, in Image one finds all 'expressionistic' painting literally pushed to the periphery of the canvas. Strassburger's identifiable spraypainted gestures and his self-indulgent swooping strokes are in a handful of works now only a curtain pulled to the edges in order to literalize these works as a tabula rasa.