Gallery Pamme-Vogelsang, Cologne, 2021: The exhibition “Verdichtungen und Einblicke” is the 5th solo exhibition of Nele Ströbel in our gallery. In the meantime, we have been accompanying Nele Ströbel on her artistic path for more than 10 years and are regularly surprised and inspired by her interventions.

In the new exhibition Nele Ströbel gives us insights into urban structures see also: “Verdichtungen – ein Stadtgespräch 2020” and her “REM-Terrakotten” invite us to discover hidden spaces. Furthermore, the artist will present her large-format “Corona Diary” for the first time. It consists of about 50 linocuts – each sheet a work of art. Images that take the viewer directly out of the narrow confines of the present ordinances that govern life.

Nele Ströbel’s work is always about the socio-political present. Using a wide variety of media, she transforms her findings into autonomous works of art whose complexity allows for new associations and also provokes them.

The art of Nele Ströbel asks to think things / facts / condemnations in a new way. In her installations she deconstructs and neatly mixes up individual aspects. It gives the viewer the courage to rethink the familiar and overcome condemnations.

As a sculptor, Nele Ströbel has little interest in genre boundaries. She understands her artistic work as acting in this world, in the world in front of the mirror and the screen. Her artistic “aggregate states” emerge and become tangible in the present space, in the space of the factual-political now.

We show installations, sculptures and graphics by the artist, created mainly in the past 14 months. “Verdichtungen & Einblicke” negotiates four thematic areas in which the artist has explored structures of life with a micro- and macroscopic view and transformed them into works of art. The works of Nele Ströbel are settings that give the viewer new, additional impulses in thinking about the world. Last spring, during the first shutdown, Nele Ströbel launched her resilience project with the events “Verdichtungen – ein Stadtgespräch 2020” at the Munich Viehhof. We can now show some of the exhibits there in Cologne. We also show the very personal “Corona Diary” of Nele Ströbel. The 60-page large album contains linocuts from Shutdown with watercolor frottages of the artist’s mail correspondence and impressions of linocuts from the immediate years after 1945. The latter are poignant motifs from an attic find. The SEM terracottas are ́condensations` of the artistic exploration of images derived from the microscopic gaze. The title REM stands for two levels of meaning: the REM microscope (scanning electron microscope) and the REM phase in sleep (rapid eye movement). With the microscope, fantastic casings of single-celled organisms can be discovered, and in sleep, dream webs remind us of hidden rooms. The “dance on the volcano” is not so new. With her sculpture group “Berliner Totentanz” (“Berlin Dance of Death”) made of colored wood, Nele Ströbel takes up the monumental medieval mural of the same name in St. Mary’s Church at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Today, such a dance of skeletons with people from all social classes may seem macabre to us. The artist’s interpretation is friendlier. Numerous drawings and prints complete the exhibition. Thanks to the large window front, the exhibition can also be easily viewed from the street – and hopefully soon through “live” visits to the gallery rooms. You are welcome to register for such life visits by e-mail(info@pamme-vogelsang.de) or by phone at 0221/80 15 87 63. In its current exhibition “Boredom in Paradise”, the Frauenmuseum in Bonn is showing, among other things, the installation “The Other Garden” by Nele Ströbel until 31.10.21.