Julian Heuser’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of painting, collage, and object-based work. With a background in architecture and a Master of Fine Arts from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, Heuser combines traditional materials (acrylic, oil, spray paint, markers) with digital imagery, paper prints, and chalk. His multilayered compositions explore the sensory overload and fragmentation inherent in contemporary visual culture. In his works, Heuser captures the tension between the analog and digital, inviting viewers to reflect on how meaning is constructed in a media-saturated world. Often playful yet unsettling, his canvases act as interfaces chaotic, humorous, and deeply human.

Heuser has exhibited widely in Germany and Austria, including recent solo shows at Elektrohalle Rhomberg (Salzburg) and Galerie FILIALE (Frankfurt am Main). “Suspension of Disbelief” marks both the first collaboration between Julian Heuser and Galerie 3AP and a continuation of his investigation into perception, illusion, and the fine line between constructed image and emotional truth. Heuser’s work combines techniques from painting, collage, and drawing with the layered codes of comic books, sci-fi pulp (Perry Rhodan), and horror aesthetics. The exhibition invites viewers into a world where vivid colors, cryptic symbols, and fantastical elements collide with the unsettling. Drawing on a deep sensitivity to the eerie and the unseen, his paintings evoke encounters with monsters, the unfamiliar, and societal projections of fear and horror. His work confronts themes often pushed to the margins: death, decay, the repression of emotion. Through a visual language that is both playful and disorienting, he challenges us to question what lies beneath the surface – of the image, of the self, and of collective imagination. At the heart of this exhibition lies a proposition: that we willingly suspend our disbelief in order to truly engage with what is presented – not more, not less. His paintings do not demand understanding, but attention. They ask us not to decode, but to witness. The title refers to the media theory term “suspension of disbelief”: the conscious decision to accept the unreal as temporarily real. Heuser embraces this space of ambiguity – where monsters appear, meaning dissolves, and surface becomes emotion. Heuser’s canvases don’t seek to explain – they ask you to stay with the image, to feel your way through its ambiguity rather than resolve it.