Leopold Strobl
Main exhibition, 60th Biennale di Venezia
20 April – 24 November 2024
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the title Foreigners Everywhere, the main exhibition of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2024 explores the concept of the outsider. “Wherever you go, you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere," Pedrosa has explained. "No matter where you find yourself, you are always, truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.” The title is drawn from a series of works begun in 2004 by the artist collective Claire Fontaine that produced sculptures featuring the words “Foreigners Everywhere” in different languages. That phrase in turn references the work of a Turin-based collective titled Stranieri Ovunque who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s.
Pedrosa travelled to Austria in July 2023 at the invitation of Phileas. As a result of his research, Pedrosa invited Leopold Strobl to participate in the main exhibition of the Biennale. Strobl (born 1960 in Mistelbach, Austria) is a self-taught artist who has worked for the past 15 years at the Gugging House of Artists, a cultural centre outside Vienna at which artistically gifted individuals undergoing psychiatric treatment are invited to live and produce art.
His small-format drawings mostly depict landscapes, often overlaid on images taken from newspapers. They can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Treger/Saint Silvestre Art Brut Collection, Portugal; and the abcd ART BRUT Collection, France. He lives and works in Poysdorf and Kritzendorf, Austria.
This is Strobl’s first collaboration with Phileas.
