Ingeborg Strobl

1949 (Schladming/Styria) - 2017 (Vienna)

1967–1972 Studied at Vienna Academy of Applied Arts under Franz Herberth, with emphasis on graphic design. 1972–1974 Visited London Royal College of Art, where the artist obtained her Master of Arts Degree in Ceramics. The artist’s works were exhibited at Neue Galerie Graz in 1974 and 1980. Her work recurrently deals with the tense relationship between humans and creatures, the image of women in advertising, and everyday sexisms in the media. With her ceramic work she assumes an important special role in Austrian sculpture. She also makes works that represent conscious anti-design.

In the 1970s she worked above all as a ceramic artist and graphic designer, exploring writing and language in collages. In the 1980s she turned to formally reduced, sign-like, symbolic animal figures. Together with Ona B., Evelyne Egerer and Birgit Jürgenssen, she founded “Die Damen” in 1988, a group working in the field of process-based performance. Ingeborg Strobl works with different media such as photography, film, graphic design, comics, artist’s book, installation and object art. The focus on nature, art and artificiality is immanent in all media.

Her works were exhibited at the Vienna Secession in 1992, and in 1994 she took part in the Biennial of Graphic Design in Zagreb. In 1993 the artist won the Prize of the City of Vienna and in 2000 she received the Achievement Prize of Styria Province. In 1999–2001 Strobl was visiting professor at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2008 the renowned artist received the Achievement Prize for Artistic Photography of the Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture, the same year she carried out a project for art in public space in Vienna titled ein Garten(zum Beispiel), an expansive façade design depicting flowers that would thrive in Vienna – based on 19th-century woodcuts. In the middle of urban space, the result is a sign for a new political and ecological understanding as a reminder of the value of local plants and foodstuffs. In the course of her career, Strobl’s works have been on show at MUMOK in Vienna, at the Pinacotheca in Ravenna, Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, and at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago.