Ricco/Maresca in New York presents “Underneath”, an exhibition dedicated to Leopold Strobl. Born in Mistelbach in 1960, the artist works with photographs clipped from local newspapers, mounting them on drawing paper and transforming them with graphite and coloured pencils. Dense black formations obscure roads, buildings, landscapes and figures, turning the original motifs into mysterious and silent visual worlds.
Subtle layers of green, grey, yellow, blue and ivory blur the boundaries between photography and drawing. The resulting small-format works possess an extraordinary sense of spatial expanse – at once familiar and uncanny. In 2018, five of Strobl’s works entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
