Crossings
Inside and outside, movement and paths, light and shadow, materiality and free space – the Munich sculptor Nele Ströbel has been dealing with experienced space, the conditions for architecture and its perception by humans for quite some time.
Highly complex structures of relationships, from whose phenomenological-artistic investigation objects emerge in Ströbel’s work, which, like still-image-like excerpts from this path of exploration, concretize, illuminate, and continue individual stations of the exploration.
The new terracottas and works on paper that Nele Ströbel is now showing in her current exhibition are the result of her artistic exploration of the theme of
“Intersections” emerged.
The term intersection is, the ambiguity inherent in it a priori, linguistically ambiguous. A crossbreed can mean the overlapping of (traffic) routes, or designate the genetic process that gives rise to new plant species and varieties or animal breeds from different ones. Crossroads here and there have to do with encounter, decision and reorientation – are spatial or temporal places of communication, reflection and creation.
With the “Frames”, as Nele Ströbel calls her terracotta boxes conceived as wall objects, the familiar image size of computer screens becomes a three-dimensional image space, implemented in the age-old, digitalnon-material
Creation contradictory, analog material sound. They contain more or less intertwined bands that, as complex path systems, penetrate and plumb the depths of the space available to them, sometimes behind lattice-like openwork fronts. In the sequence, the frames become components of storyboards of the exploration of dynamic space genesis.
In her large-format works on paper, Ströbel deals with architectural-spatial experiences in a more representational and pictorial way. The two-dimensionality of the building sketches is blown up, extended with the scalpel by the quite factual interaction of light and shadow. Cut-outs in black clay paper clarify shapes and outlines as silhouettes or dissolve them into grid structures. It is this field of tension between opening and closing, concealment and insight, separating and connecting that the artist also deals with intensively in her drawings of lattice and braided structures processed with neon afterglow paint.
Rich in history and reference, clay and paper are among Nele Ströbel’s favorite materials. In the concrete shaping and presentation of her objects, however, immaterial light in particular becomes the important corresponding and in every respect illuminating “material” of her exciting explorations of the world and its forms.

Dagmar Schott M.A. 2010