Walter Strobl

(*1968)

Walter Strobl was born in Innsbruck in 1968 and lives and works as an Austrian painter in Vienna. He attended the technical school for applied painting at the HTL II in Innsbruck. Then he studied for three more years at the higher educational institution for arts and crafts. Strobl also studied painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Arik Bauer and Josef Mikl. From 2009 he is a member of the Society of Fine Artists Austria in the Künstlerhaus in Vienna.

Walter Strobl’s works, regardless of whether they are on canvas or paper, are basically palimpsests: Strobl first breaks down what has been seen into basic structural forms, then takes them and reassembles them in his painting (as well as in drawings and graphics). His still lifes and interiors, developed entirely from light and dark gray, nevertheless show an unusual freshness and color beauty of the coloring, whereby he mainly chooses intermediate tones. Walter Strobls possesses the ability to achieve a completely different visual effect with almost the same motif through different lighting scenarios. The color material of his pictures, set with a wider brush and shaped by the brushwork, has a creamy impasto character. Strobl’s painting is also reminiscent of the constructed nature of the world in general: his cityscapes, pictures of rooms and passages subtly indicate that we actually always move through arranged realities. Walter Strobl treats the closed space in the same way as the open space in his pictures. It is the same, tightly woven, agitated and compressed substance that is more reminiscent of something thick, space-filling than what we would call air. He himself says: „The pictures are not images, but the results of a process in which feeling, thinking and craft are related to one another.“ His pictures are metaphors for the essence of mass society in its cities and for the constraints of a life in largely fixed paths. Strobl reaches for individual aspects of reality and processes them according to the situation. The files testify to a body language full of tension, as can be found in actionism. This body dramaturgy captivates with tangible reality and its intensity is reminiscent of Lucian Freud and the London School. His, as he calls them, „thrown“, they are ultimately creatures who have to use the power of desperation to conquer the last free spaces for the physical: Every movement is opposed to a physical limit. Walter Strobl creates a game of spatial perception, the perception of the body in space and the rhythm in space. The very tight lines and the resolution of the movements darken. He manages a metaphysical examination of the term „movement“. Concepts and image motifs lose their focus, a composition determined by vertical and horizontal lines gives the images structure almost invisibly. Strobl explores painterly possibilities and thus creates several levels of looking. The picture becomes a window.

The exhibitions „Body Space Structure“ (2016), „Giovanni Rindler & Walter Strobl“ (2018) and „Urbane und figurale Projektionen“ (2020) were impressive work presentations in the Lehner Gallery.

Source: http://www.walterstrobl.at/

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