LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, A-4021 Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1

Tel: +43 (0)732.7070-3600 Fax: +43 (0)732.7070-3604 www.lentos.at

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Information Sheet

INGEBORG STROBL

24 June until 18 September 2016

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Content

Exhibition Facts ………………………………………………………………………….. 3

Press Text …………………………………………………………………………………… 4

Catalogue Text.…………………………………………………………………………….. 5

Press Images ……………………………………………………………………………….. 10

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Exhibition Facts

Exhibition Title INGEBORG STROBL

Exhibition Period 24 June until 18 September 2016

Opening Thursday, 23 June 2016, 7.30 pm

Press Conference Thursday, 23 June 2016, 11:00 am

Exhibition Venue LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, upper floor

Curator Stella Rollig

Exhibits For the large exhibition hall at LENTOS Ingeborg Strobl has created a presentation that freely associates works from all phases of her oeuvre. Collages, objects, photographs, posters, drawings, watercolours, ceramic and porcelain objects, prints, film and audiorecords and postcards

Publication The book Ingeborg Strobl is published by Verlag für moderne Kunst to

coincide with the exhibition and features an essay by Stella Rollig (144 pages, richly illustrated with colour photographs, German/English, ISBN 978-3-903131-24-8), € 24

Contact Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1, 4020 Linz, Tel. +43(0)732/7070-3600;

info@lentos.at, www.lentos.at

Opening Hours Tue–Sun 10 am to 6 pm, Thur 10 am to 9 pm, Mon closed

Admission € 8; concessions € 6

Press Contact Johanna Hofer, T +43(0)732.7070.3603, johanna.hofer@lentos.at

Available at the Press Conference:

Bernhard Baier, Deputy Mayor and Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, Stella Rollig, Director LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, and the artist Ingeborg Strobl.

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Press Text

Ingeborg Strobl’s work is to be read as a narrative continued, as a fabric where

each thread is interwoven with another. Appropriating, highlighting, correlating

are all mainstays of the approach with which she charges her material with new

meaning.

Strobl’s principal media include collage, photography, offset print/artist’s book,

watercolour, and video. But her oeuvre also comprises large-scale art-inarchitecture

designs. When working on small-scale formats, she does so out of

conviction, taking a deliberate stand against overproduction, consumption, and

wasted resources.

The trivial and the incidental, the objects found along the wayside of life, the

unintentional poetry of nature, and the unconscious curiosity of human

endeavour are all captured in the fine meshwork of Strobl’s attention and then,

artistically rendered, in the exhibition space itself.

Leading Austrian art houses have dedicated solo exhibitions to Strobl’s works,

including the Vienna Secession 1992 and the Kunsthaus Bregenz 1999. She

is also the recipient of several art prizes. In 1987, she founded the influential

group Die Damen with Ona B., Evelyne Egerer, and Birgit Jürgenssen and

remained a member until 1992.

Ingeborg Strobl continues the series of solo exhibitions featuring Austria’s

leading contemporary artists at the LENTOS Art Museum. For the large

exhibition hall at LENTOS she has created a presentation that freely associates

works from all phases of her oeuvre and invites the viewers to let their minds wander.

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Catalogue Texts by Stella Rollig

The Lady’s a Maverick

She gets too hungry for dinner at eight

She likes the movies and never comes late

She never bothers with people she’d hate

Ingeborg Strobl began to blaze her own trail early on. I don’t think the vocation of ‘visual

artist’ was ever an obvious one for the young girl; in fact, is it ever? Be that as it may, in

1972, this young woman from the province of Styria graduated from what was then the

Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. She was 23 years old at the time and, with the offer of a

scholarship abroad before her, she chose to travel to London, which in 1972 was by no

means a bad choice. Just think Ziggy Stardust, Electric Light Orchestra, Jesus Christ

Superstar, the first official Gay Pride Parade … but also Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland,

and murderous political clashes. But Strobl remained largely unfazed by Swinging London

and the political tensions. She was busy exploring everyday life in London, first and

foremost its secondary locations, ideally the somewhat dilapidated East End with its derelict

buildings and its jumble sales.

In London she found herself at a top school (more by coincidence than conscious

orientation), namely the Royal College of Art, where she ventured down a side path that

branched off to a ceramics class. Thanks to Carol McNicoll, a fellow student and girlfriend of

Brian Eno at the time, she also found herself within the ambit of Roxy Music. All by sheer

coincidence, by Strobl’s own account.

She attended the College for two years, creating gorgeous ceramic objects which she

combined in part with other materials such as leather, fur, feathers, horn and metal. They

include a complete Hufservice [Hoof Service] with Hufschale [Hoof Cup], Hufkanne [Hoof

Jug], Hufbehälter [Hoof Container] and Hufvase [Hoof Vase], all receptacles made from light

ceramic in the shape of cattle hooves. There is also Eierbecher mit Hühnerklauen [Egg Cup

with Chicken Claws] and a work entitled Trinkkiefer [Drinking Jaw], a white drinking vessel

in the shape of a pig’s lower jaw with golden teeth.

For her first solo exhibition following her return to Austria, she showcased a multitude of

works from her years of study in London. She was invited to the Ecksaal [corner room] at

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the Joanneum in Graz, a platform promoting young artists. As the then Landesrat [member

of the provincial government] Kurt Jungwirth wrote in the catalogue, ‘May the Ecksaal prove

a good launch pad for Ingeborg Strobl.’ Indeed it was, and it seems the artist was never

more at ease than as an outlier exploring subsidiary routes. A maverick to this day: acting

and thinking in a way that is both idiosyncratic and unconstrained by convention.

Strobl put on solo exhibitions at leading Austrian art houses, including the Vienna Secession

and the Kunsthaus Bregenz; she executed large-scale art-in-architecture works, received

official awards, and in 1987 established the influential group Die Damen with Ona B.,

Evelyne Egerer and Birgit Jürgenssen, stirring up Vienna’s art scene with feminist verve and

impeccable styling, actions and productions, very much in the limelight of a vibrant period of

upheaval and change that characterised the early 1990s. And perhaps that limelight was a

little too bright for Strobl’s liking. Indeed, at the height of all that success and attention, our

maverick Ingeborg withdrew from the Damen to set off down the next untrodden path. No

doubt she will soon be embarking once again on one of her travels that have taken her to

countries such as Iran, Poland, India, Armenia, Japan, Georgia, Egypt, and others – as she

has done ever since she was a young woman (e.g. Prague in 1968! albeit not as a tourist

revolutionary, but on the trail of Franz Kafka).

The only photographs of Ingeborg Strobl the private individual that are publicly available

date from the Damen period, up to 1992. For Strobl personally, all the self-staging that was

at the heart of the group’s artistic practice felt alien. And she avoids portrait photographs.

We have to go back to the catalogue of the Graz exhibition of 1974 to find two rare

photographs of the artist. One on the cover, which has no text whatsoever, no caption, no

logo. Just a photograph of Ingeborg Strobl, shot from the back: her naked upper body, her

dark hair tumbling down her back, her arms spread wide as if about to leap, to take off – it’s

a wonderful pose. A dark shimmering object winds and twists its way around her right arm,

down from her head past her shoulder to beyond her fingers. Photo caption, inner: I. Strobl

with bracelet (antelope horn, not snake). And yes, it does look like a snake, so Strobl is

careful to clarify in the work’s title what might otherwise be an easy visual

misunderstanding. In fact, throughout the decades, snakes have featured time and again in

her oeuvre.

That same catalogue, a rarity we are happy to dwell on, contains another photograph of

Strobl: Trinkkiefer in Gebrauch [Drinking Jaws in Use]. Here we see the artist, flanked by

two other students, holding a ceramic object to her lips; unfortunately, she is visible only in

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profile, as lithe as a willow rod, with long hair, trendy round glasses, a cotton shirt beneath a

man’s waistcoat, light-coloured trousers – a genuine pair of sailor trousers from a London

jumble sale. Very up-to-date indeed.

After completing her studies Strobl gave up ceramics. In the years and decades that

followed, her work evolved around the notion of FINDING rather than making. That work is

created as part of an integral practice of life and art in which seeing, thinking, searching,

discovering, photographing, filming, shaping, and creating occur as a continual process,

each activity interwoven with another. Which is why Strobl has no studio (or no apartment?):

for decades now, she has lived on the same life-work-space premises, a place which in a

strange and peculiar way seems from another time while still bearing all the traces of time.

‘Travel light’ would certainly be one way of describing Strobl’s philosophy of life. And what a

clever and appealing approach it is: burdening yourself with as little as possible to retain

your autonomy and adaptability. Essentially, all Strobl needs to create her works is a table,

and production costs are low. Just a few pens, some watercolours, a pair of scissors, some

adhesive, a treasure trove of materials found in nature, printed matter, utensils of everyday

life, souvenirs, and such like.

When it comes to printed matter she is interested in ambitiously elaborate designs that have

somehow missed their mark, whose purpose has slipped away: bizarre headlines, slogans,

strange photos. She skewers life’s fun morsels and trawls for a precious catch of

misunderstandings from a sea of published material. And in this she is fierce and intolerant.

But also utterly gentle and affectionate when paying tribute to the poetry of small things;

when working with ‘low-grade’ materials, with paper, cardboard or the seemingly worthless,

the sort of thing you once got out of bubble-gum machines; when observing, photographing

and filming animals from her surroundings; when capturing and paying tribute to the survival

techniques of rural populations on her journeys to remote regions of the world. She herself

would say she is joyful, appreciative, devoted to the beautiful things of life, and yet her zest

for life chafes against her empathy for the world and its creatures in their deplorable state.

Ingeborg Strobl’s work is to be seen as a narrative continued, as a fabric where every

thread is interwoven with another. Other mainstays of her approach include appropriating,

highlighting, correlating and, therefore, charging with new meaning. It is rare for her to fuse

several images together or images and text fragments – as the collage avant-garde of Max

Ernst, John Heartfield and Hannah Höch have done; she usually prefers to juxtapose visual

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and verbal image elements. Some of it remains enigmatic, some of it platitudinous; and yet

it is impossible to pull away from the undertow and the compelling force exerted by the

decidedly content-related and supremely visual expression of someone very much of her

time in her watchfulness, her curiosity and criticism, someone who has chosen to take a

stand. The most beautiful personal testimony is the publication for the Werkschau at the

Fotogalerie Wien in 2013, featuring a selection of one photograph for every year from 1967

(holiday in Bibione, Italy) to 2012 (Arambol, India). It’s all there: summer in the mountains

(time and again), a goat standing still, dead mice, the sign above a butcher’s stall in Tunisia,

a scary mudslide, ornaments on tiled surfaces, tanks by the roadside, monuments,

artworks, cars, and people. Each photograph has its own pithy text couched in Strobl’s

characteristic blend of narrated personal circumstances and inner state of mind, of facts,

political statement, and detailed observation. It’s always fascinating and at times rather

funny, too.

It befits Strobl’s oeuvre that, for all the books and the brochures, there has never yet been a

catalogue of works. In fact, with Strobl, the term artwork leads a precarious existence.

Objects are brought together temporarily in different places of performance and in different

arrangements, only to go their separate ways again. But to those collectors who may be

wondering, fear not: the works of Ingeborg Strobl can certainly be acquired and preserved,

as the Strobl inventories held by mumok, Wien Museum, MAK, Joanneum, LENTOS and

evn collection amply demonstrate.

Finally, we ought to mention two of Strobl’s passions. One is printed matter. As we

mentioned earlier, Strobl has published many printed works; indeed, she is an expert on

printing techniques, paper grades, binding, and fonts. And it goes without saying that this

publication, too, has been meticulously designed by the artist herself, down to the last detail.

Among her publications are two bound high-gloss Photo Romane as well as a series of slim

brochures which, like Strobl’s objects and images, use text in a fragmentary, pointed way,

preferring to communicate visually.

Her other passion is cinema. Going to the cinema plays an eminently important part in the

artist’s life. She watches all sorts of films and in vast numbers: mainstream Hollywood and

art-house films, feature films, and documentaries. And always at the cinema. In fact, it’s

impossible to imagine Strobl in bed binge-watching series on her tablet. She much prefers it

the old-fashioned way, just as she prefers analogue photography. She likes to keep the

digital at a distance, except when it comes to video. For a number of years now she has

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been producing short video films on a regular basis; succinct observations of everyday

scenes: a brightly coloured paper lantern twirling in a draft, a girl holding a cat up to the

camera, or someone coming up the stairs. It’s as if Strobl were producing intermediate cuts

for the feature films she loves to watch on the big screen. Nothing special, but to

paraphrase Karl Kraus: The closer the look one takes at the quotidian, the greater the

distance from which it looks back. It is the strange and the unfamiliar that challenges us to

explore further, with a second glance, and then a third.

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Press Images

Press Images available for download at www.lentos.at.

Free use of press images only in conjunction with the relevant exhibition.

1. Ingeborg Strobl, Over the years, 2015. ©

Bildrecht Wien, 2016

2. Ingeborg Strobl, Vase (calf’s

trotter, bone, nut),1973. ©

Bildrecht Wien, 2016

3. Ingeborg Strobl, Over the years, 1989–2015. ©

Bildrecht Wien, 2016

4. Ingeborg Strobl, afternoon in the stuffy newly

built flat, 2001, Photo: Manfred Thumberger. ©

Bildrecht Wien, 2016

5. Ingeborg Strobl, Artist's Book Das Tier [The Animal], 1992, Photo

Manfred Thumberger. © Bildrecht Wien, 2016

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6. Ingeborg Strobl, Genuine Jewellery, Photo:

Alfred Damm. © Bildrecht Wien, 2016

7. Ingeborg Strobl, I’m not a bad person, Photo: Manfred

Thumberger. © Bildrecht Wien, 2016

8. Ingeborg Strobl, Shattered Plate with

Patterned Edges, Photo Alfred Damm. ©

Bildrecht Wien, 2016

9. Ingeborg Strobl, Over the years, 2006–2015.

© Bildrecht Wien, 2016

11. Ingeborg Strobl, Golden autumn, 2015. © Bildrecht Wien,

2016

10. Ingeborg Strobl, Poster, 2013. © Bildrecht

Wien, 2016

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12. Ingeborg Strobl, Cat Warsaw, 2010. 13. Exhibition view, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

© Bildrecht Wien, 2016 Photo: Reinhard Haider

14. Exhibition view, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, 15. Exhibition view, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz,

Photo: Reinhard Haider Photo: Reinhard Haider

16. and 17. Exhibition view, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, Photo: Reinhard Haider