For Visual Artist Mikael Christian Strøbek, Reality And Perception Are Subjective To Us All

You’ve said, “I see my practice as being layered with a multitude of different progressional themes, which all live side by side in both my theoretical and my practical work.” Can you talk a little about what these themes are, and how you seek to portray them through sculpture and installation?

The different layers that I work with represent mostly theoretical aspects that lie “behind” the art pieces. I try very hard to keep my work as neutral as possible and my subjectivity out of the way. But the layers I often implement are classical elements, such as how one applies foreground, middleground, and background. In many of my works where I use color as a layer on top of a material, I use black. Black as a color, abstractly speaking, inherently describes the“I try very hard to keep my work as neutral as possible and my subjectivity out of the way” background and when one pulls it out into the room, a certain innate energy arises: as one tries to perceive the form, it constantly fights to become a shape, a silhouette, two-dimensional. This constant “pull” is for me like the visual equivalent to magnetism or gravity and also brings liminality—the realization of being between two states, or transitioning—into the physical world and work.

Another layer is perception. Recently, I have revived a theme that was my starting point as an artist—Trompe-l’œil or the deceiving of the eye; a Renaissance theme that sought to question the viewer’s perception of what was real. An example of this is my wall drawing ’Four Circles (v)’. There is a point in the space from where it seems that four black circles are stacked neatly in the corner of the room. When moving away from this point, the perceived circles start to deconstruct themselves and warp, showing that it is composed of half-circles painted onto angular meeting walls.