THIRD PLACE – Leporello Stories

'I came to the leporello, the "open book", through drawing in the oriental city. Because it is double-sided, it is an extremely lively, analogue medium for me to tell stories. In Damascus, the water pipes were being renewed and so the streets were huge building sites with mountains of excavated sand, all unsecured. I climbed onto these viewing platforms with folded sheets of paper and sketched the city in my improvised sketchbook despite the wind and dust. Soon I began to mark the backsides as well. Since then, I have prepared hand-sized folds of thick paper for every journey, every exploration. Leporellos were created in Aleppo, Cairo, Genoa and also in Neukölln. For the exhibition "The Other Garden", I created an entire museum room with leporello walls in watercolour and ink, some of which also had cut-outs. As a spatial relative to the sculptor's book, it is relief, surface or closed, round form; when the two ends touch, it fascinates me very much.' – Nele Ströbel on the significance of the leporello as an 'open book' in her artistic work:


Nele Ströbel, born in Stuttgart in 1957, grew up in Munich and Minneapolis. From 1979 to 1985 she studied sculpture and new media with Prof Wander Bertoni, Oswald Oberhuber and Peter Weibel at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her main themes are: 'The city as workshop', 'Repairs of the world', 'The other garden'. She is a member of the BBK Berlin and BBK Munich as well as Deutscher Künstlerbund and on the board of the International Artists' Committee (IKG). Nele Ströbel has been working with the medium of books and fanfolds since 1998. In addition to numerous catalogues accompanying exhibitions, she has produced the 60-volume 'Art Book Library for Dr. Hertha Einstein-Nathorff' and many leporellos in mixed media. Nele Ströbel lives and works in her studio in Munich and Berlin.