Strobl’s oeuvre is very extensive and consists of a number of phases that marked out the path to his most recent and most productive period. His monochrome use of color, primarily green and yellow, as well as his continual, intuitive occupation with forms make up the cornerstone of his art. He began creating his most important body of work in 2014: it consists of small-format drawings whose point of departure is provided by newspaper clippings, which he fills with overdrawing in black, green, and yellow colored pencil. Strobl uses a black colored pencil to cover up any depictions of people, vehicles, or animals, and he also uses it to draw the contour lines that provide the image with a new composition. The sky, which occupies a special place in Strobl’s oeuvre, is drawn over in green and all the other elements of the picture in yellow. Within this period of the artist’s oeuvre, which has been going on for ten years now, we can find formal and thematic points of emphasis. The hills or mountains in the middle or along the edges of the pictures represent one dominant and repeatedly recurring compositional element. For Strobl, these forms drawn in black colored pencil also represent a very important thematic component: for the devout artist, these elevated areas are reaching toward God and represent the “upward striving” of religion. In addition to landscapes, there are also works featuring architecture, churches, and the characteristic wine-cellar lanes of Lower Austria. These often regional images exist alongside depictions of war zones that come from all over the world and introduce a component of topical political relevance—although one that is unintended by the artist. The scenes almost always appear deserted. Upon closer inspection, however, the figures covered in black show through— sometimes more and sometimes less—appearing almost like shadows of the past. This impression of a remote time is reinforced through his use of a black colored pencil to accentuate the drawings’ edges and round off their corners in a manner reminiscent of historical photographs. However, the amorphous forms inhabiting his works represent an unsettling break with this historicizing reading. Instead, they underscore the “mysteriousness” that the artist attributes to his works, but which he also sees as inherent to reality.

Leopold Strobl was born in the Austrian town of Mistelbach in 1960, and he has been creating art ever since he was a child. After finishing school, he worked for the town of Poysdorf for ten years. The artist began coming to the atelier gugging in 2002 and was there almost every day in those early years; since around 2019, he has been creating his artworks at his two homes in Poysdorf and Kritzendorf. Strobl has close ties to the art brut center gugging and is represented by the galerie gugging. His works have been presented at the museum gugging since 2021, and his art has been attracting international attention since 2016.