Leopold Strobl grew up in a rural region north of Vienna, where he still lives today, and has drawn and painted since childhood, without ever pursuing formal training. Dreamlike though his scenarios may seem, they are generated from snippets of media-filtered reality. The artist detects their transformative potential as if with a divining rod, drawing it out compositionally. Tinted yellow and green, outlined with sparse strokes, landscapes emerge in ghostly monumentality, while the people in the images and their fetishes are barely perceptible as spectres beneath the dragnet drawn over them. Though his work may bring to mind Arnulf Rainer’s overpaintings and the aesthetic strategies of collage, Strobl developed his style absent any references to art history. His works are compelling not only for their diaristic, almost ritual, nature but also for their consistent orientation from an internal perspective. The curving black edges in each image resemble eye sockets, gazing towards an enigmatically luminous sky. Sometimes, when the overpainting rises like dark grey lava, only a sinuous fragment of this sky remains.
This is the first time the work of Leopold Strobl is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Gisela Steinlechner
