Leopold Strobl creates diminutive drawings that carry an unexpected gravity. Born in 1960 in Mistelbach, Austria, Strobl has devoted himself exclusively to art for nearly forty years. For over fifteen years, he has been associated with the Gugging House of Artists, an arts center outside Vienna where self-taught artists with psychiatric disabilities live and work - a museum, a gallery, and an open studio, Gugging is one of the world’s most important centers for what is often termed “outsider art”. Working daily in a ritualistic practice that has remained unchanged for decades, Strobl transforms clipped newspaper photographs into enigmatic landscapes drained of narrative but saturated with atmospheric presence. His source material comes from the mundane stream of local periodicals and church bulletins - images of countryside, architecture, distant views - which he radically reimagines through an obsessive layering of graphite and colored pencil.
The artist’s method follows a strict sequence. After selecting a photograph and cutting it from its printed context, Strobl mounts the image on drawing paper. Working in solitude during morning hours, he applies dense graphite to obscure certain areas - often human figures, vehicles, or other elements that disrupt his vision. These covered forms don’t disappear, instead they become geological, swelling into boulder-like masses or undulating ridges that anchor each composition. Above these dark formations, Strobl renders skies in his signature palette of greens, yellows, and blues, building color through patient accretion until the penciled surface achieves an unexpected luminosity.
What distinguishes Strobl’s work is how completely the found photograph and his drawn interventions fuse. The graphite masses absorb the light, texture, and shadow of the photographic detail beneath them, so that what reads as pure drawing actually carries
the DNA of the original image. His color application responds to the photograph’s existing tonalities, creating an uncanny marriage between mechanical reproduction and handmade mark. Rounded corners frame many compositions, evoking vintage photography and reinforcing a sense of temporal distance, as if these scenes depict not places but memories of places, half-dissolved by time. Strobl has described his drawings as containing mystery, but frames this quality as something discovered rather than invented - mystery as an inherent property of existence that his process merely reveals. Each finished work receives a personal insignia on the reverse: Strobl’s name accompanied by a heart pierced by a radiant cross, reflecting the faith central to his life. The drawings remain untitled. “I have to do it day and night... paint the green of the sky,” Strobl has said of his compulsion to work. For him, art functions as communication, a means to express “tranquility, intensity, and peace.”
Leopold Strobl (b. 1960 in Mistelbach, Austria). Strobl now lives with his family in Lower Austria, working from home while maintaining close ties to the Art Brut Center Gugging. In 2018, The Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired his work for its permanent collection. In 2024, he participated in the 60th International Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York (2023, 2020) and Galerie Christian Berst (2022, 2020). He is represented by Galerie Gugging, Austria and Ricco/ Maresca Gallery, New York.