Ingeborg Strobl’s work is in the tradition of conceptual and cross-media art. In her objects, installations, collages, paintings, photographs, videos, and publications, images of nature and of animals play a key role as mirrors of society. Strobl is interested in the marginal, covert, and repressed, and her work also displays a humorous and witty rejection of extreme consumerism and production. 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. On her journeys through former Eastern Bloc countries, Africa, and Asia, Strobl took photographs that capture contemporary moments of transition. Again and again, her interest in decay and transience comes to the fore, as in numerous photographs of cemeteries. This has nothing to do with disinterest in the world, as it can be seen as a form of subtle study of the living, and of the present and the future. Strobl left her personal archive and numerous works to mumok as a gift, and this bequest forms the major part of this retrospective show.

Curated by Rainer Fuchs