on hold on I

Excerpt from the press release:

For her exhibition ON HOLD ON at Städtische Galerie Cordonhaus Cham Johanna Strobel extensively transformed the space. She built walls in front of the windows so that now peepholes open up unfamiliar perspectives on satellite dishes, distorting mirrors, or an index finger pointing back to the observer where these windows used to be. Trompe l'oeil wall paintings of doors create the perfect illusion of additional rooms.

The museum has two exhibition rooms. In one room Johanna Strobel shows a series of paintings while in the other room, she shows terracotta sculptures.
Strobel works with the room, not against it. Directly referring to the terracotta floor of the Renaissance building, Strobel shows terracotta multiples, which seem as if the floor itself has produced the sculptures. The terracotta or brick motif is also found on the pillowcases of the museum stools or the curtain through which, as through the wall, one of the rooms has to be entered.

Strobel’s paintings do not depict real spaces or possible architectures in which narrative situations take place; her sculptures open up a linguistic space rather than a spatial one. She develops abstract scenes that are both axiomatic and enigmatic, and in which different forms and elements meet. Her own idiosyncratic logic and her use of (impossible) structures, serve her as a mental springboard. She uses a pool of recurring motifs like hands, tennis balls, bananas or door handles, to explore how objects, as things observed and perceived by subjects, achieve meaning - general and personal.
The precise and multi-layered, catchy and elaborate deliberate confusion of the exhibition oscillates between suggestion and transparency.

Augenbricks is an interlingual pun; the German word Augenblick means moment or blink of an eye. The work was inspired by the brick floor of the exhibition space but also from a brick wall inside Strobel's New York apartment that gave off weird smells and sounds for which neither national grid, nor an exterminator nor mold experts found an explanation. The wall certainly not only had eyes, but noses, too. The smell and sounds stopped after a year though.

Strobel does not depict actual spaces or possible architectures in which narrative situations take place. She develops abstract scenes that are both axiomatic and enigmatic, and in which different forms and elements meet.
All paintings in this series show two identical (mirrored) hands. While in all paintings these hands have the same actual size, the size of the canvas and thereby the detail and proportion of the hands varies in relation to the size of the painting.
To the hands, which remain identical except for the color of the nail polish, changing elements or motifs are added. In complex spatial situations, the manicured hands reach into cavities or protrude out of them and are combined with other systems of representation: pictogram-like elements, line drawings and geometrical shapes which sometimes create volumes, sometimes cavities, intersecting or nesting inside each other.
The pictorial space becomes a system in which forms and objects can be combined to different chains of meaning. Depending on how structure and module relate to each other, the gestures embodied by the hands, and the linguistic access to them, change: access, intervene, reach into, grasp, let go, or hold on to.
While all the paintings of the series depict the same gesture which is open to interpretation, Strobel avoids the "painterly gesture" - still an expression of (male) genius and spontaneity – not least through the use of modules and systems and a formalized and partly typographic painting style.