INGEBORG STROBL Having Lived

Ingeborg Strobl’s oeuvre is moored in the tradition of conceptual and intermedia art. Natural and animal subjects acting as mirror images of society take up a central role in her objects, installations, collages, paintings, photographs, films, and publications. Also evident in her work is a predilection for the marginal, the hidden, that which is all-too easy to overlook or repress as well as a concomitant aversion to obsessive production and consumption.

Her earliest works are color crayon drawings and the ceramics she made while a student in London. Both of these groups of works are characterized by a surreal illusionism with animal motifs, in which the artist’s sense of the hidden beauty of the ephemereal, or the transitory nature of all splendor, is already apparent.

Strobl donated her archive with numerous works and printed matter to mumok. This archival material is the centerpiece of the retrospective, which was conceived in collaboration with the artist—before her death in April 2017—and gives a representative overview of her comprehensive oeuvre.