Leopold Strobl, born in 1960 in Mistelbach, Lower Austria, has been devoted to art since his early twenties and has attended the open studio program at the Gugging Art Brut center for more than two decades. Working almost every morning and typically completing one drawing a day, Strobl has developed a visual language of remarkable consistency and mystery. His deliberately small works begin with photographs clipped from local newspapers, which he mounts on drawing paper and transforms through graphite and layered color. In 2018, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired five of his works, just two years after his debut exhibition. Strobl traces, obscures, and reimagines what he finds. Architectural details, roads, horizon lines, woods, and bodies are absorbed into dense graphite formations that can resemble boulders, mountain peaks, waves, pods, or prehistoric eggs. Figures are not simply erased: the shapes that cover them retain the weight of what has disappeared, freezing motion and silencing narrative while folding it into the surrounding landscape. Subtle layers of green, gray, yellow, blue, and ivory further blur the boundary between photograph and intervention, until it becomes difficult to tell where the found image ends and Strobl’s hand begins. The resulting scenes are at once familiar and uncanny, still yet charged with presence. Across these variations, Strobl creates a world of equilibrium and transformation, where fragments seem to point toward something larger and every tiny image opens onto a remarkably expansive space.
Ricco/Maresca