Hendrik Stroebel
Current Review(s)
Recollect
Hendrik Stroebel at KZNSAI have never found writing a review so difficult. Hendrik Stroebel’s exhibition at the KZNSA defies any sense of order or rationality in its sheer overwhelming volume. The exhibition showcases a body of work created over the last 16 years – with 185 individual pieces on show.
Stroebel kindly walked me through the exhibition – a far more relaxed and easygoing man than I had expected, considering the almost obsessive detail evident in his work. While the press release glossed over the show as an exhibition culminating in the 'artist’s remarkable journey…to the near East, Levant and central Asia' where 'the artist's abiding interest in antiquity is literally woven into these extraordinary images', the work is in fact almost impossibly layered and difficult to pin down.
To attempt to untangle the show: Stroebel travels, he photographs his travels, he then painstakingly embroiders scenes from the travels. But somehow that is not enough. The work is almost suffocating in its sheer volume. The intricacy, the minute needlework, the complex cotton hues (mixed by weaving single strands of cotton together) become something other than a memento or a souvenir of ‘travel’. Each snapshot-size image takes Stroebel up to 40 hours to embroider, images of watermelons and minarets and friends made en route. While ‘snapping’ the picture would have taken a few seconds, Stroebel’s painstaking retelling of the story becomes a compulsive reliving of each incident.
01 June 2011 - 25 June 2011
Listings(s)
'Recollect'
Hendrik Stroebel at KZNSAThe exhibition is a culmination of Stroebel's journeys through the Levant and Central Asia. Combining ceramics, carved wood, bronze and embroidery, the body of work is intensely labour intensive and textural.
01 June 2011 - 25 June 2011
