Galleria Immaginaria in Florence, in collaboration with Itaca Firenze, house of art and culture, is pleased to present the solo exhibition of sign, of poetry dedicated to the European Artist Karl Stengel.
A Journey into the work of a master born in 1925 in Novi Sad, Serbia, who lived through the twentieth century. Karl gave form to a work suspense between figuration and abstraction, similar to an inner diary in which nervous lines, intense primary colors, and intimate visions flow without interruption. 
At the Galleria Immaginaria Open Space, we find his large-scale pictorial works. In Stengel’s painting, color becomes voice and breath: the large canvases, traversed by a deep lyricism and an almost physical emotion, have their roots in abstract expressionism and the bold informal experiments of the post-war period. Alongside them, figuration on paper, like an uninterrupted visual diary made of swift strokes, a writing of the body and the spirit.
Works diverse in support and expressive scale, but united by a unique poetic tension, capable of holding together historical memory and personal urgency, transformed into vision.
For Stengel, drawing and painting were a continuous gesture, a vital response to music, literature, and the world’s political upheavals. Not only an inner necessity but a profound need for freedom. Throughout his life, drawing remained the most immediate and faithful medium of his thought, the place where the idea took shape without mediation.
On display at Itaca, a selection of books with original drawings. Stengel’s personal poetry books appear as total works, where the drawing traverses the word and the word welcomes the sign, involving the spectator in an intimate and universal confrontation. Pages lived, traced, inhabited: places where the drawing does not illustrate, but exists as a voice, as memory, as vital necessity.

Catalog edited by librimonpracem.