Comic Abstraction

6 JUNE – 24 JULY 2025

KÖNIG MEXICO CITY is pleased to present a group show by Jordi Alós, Henning Strassburger, and Zhivago Duncan. In recent years, several artists have abstracted imagery taken from slapstick, comic strips, cartoons and film into new visual languages that address personal experiences, social anxieties, and environmental concerns. These works rely on the viewer’s own familiarity with popular culture. Through processes of distortion, appropriation, and alienation, the comic’s vocabulary of characters and forms becomes a complex field of discourse for the contemporary.

This June, KÖNIG MEXICO CITY will bring together three artists of the same generation – Jordi Alós (Mexico), Henning Strassburger (Germany) and Zhivago Duncan (USA) – whose work reinterprets the legacy of comics within contemporary painting and sculpture. All three began drawing at a young age, shaped by an early fascination with comic books and cartoons. Though their practices are distinct, they share an interest in how figuration and humour can be used to confront more serious themes.

Jordi Alós combines cartoon-like faces with naturalistically painted bodies, disrupting the way his figures are perceived. Alós studied at UNAM’s Academy of San Carlos and has exhibited across Latin America and Europe. His paintings often explore emotional vulnerability, absurdity, and contradiction, drawing on both visual storytelling and philosophical ideas. His background in illustration and his interest in psychoanalysis come through in his fractured characters, who appear suspended between inner states and external appearances.

Henning Strassburger, exhibiting in Mexico for the first time, works across painting, sculpture, and drawing to explore identity, mass media and self-representation in the digital age. Known for his vibrant abstract paintings, he recently began incorporating figuration, including the recurring figure of Alphakenny – an alter ego that embodies the contradictions of personal expression and public persona. His works are rich with irony and cultural references, addressing how contemporary identity is shaped by algorithms, consumerism and the performance of self.

Zhivago Duncan constructs fictional characters, vehicles, and dream-like machines using beeswax, dyed canvases and symbolic imagery. His work blends mythology, metaphysics, physics and contemporary philosophy into a unique visual cosmos. The result is a densely layered world of signs and hieroglyphs that reflect emotional states and states of consciousness. Duncan’s paintings are speculative yet personal – an invented mythology that speaks to both ancient archetypes and future anxieties.

This exhibition marks the first time these three artists will be shown together and introduces Henning Strassburger to audiences in Mexico. Their shared background in comics and cartoons provides an important entry point, but their work ultimately pushes those references into new and unexpected territory, revealing how the aesthetics of popular culture can be used to reflect the complexities of modern life.

– Text by Corina Krawinkel