Maya Strobbe’s systematic graphic drawings are made with office materials

Working across the intersection of drawing, collecting, graphic design and artist books, multidisciplinary artist Maya Strobbe’s drawings are wonderfully precise. With compositions reminiscent of graphic colouring books, the artist creates her works through the repetitive use of drawing stencils, office materials and archival systems, reflecting on themes of “bureaucracy, labour and production” in her graphic illustrations.

Often working on top of file dividers, Maya’s carefully constructed playing fields of shapes come together line by line: “I systematically build the same iconic forms over and over again: a table, a flower, a chair, a human”, she says. Achieving a particular and uniform style with this meticulous drawing process, is all part of a visual language, that she tells us all her work “revolves around developing and deepening”.

Alongside her distinct drawings, Maya has worked on her fair share of publications under the name Ramsdam Books since 2015, all of which have been documented in her recent project Quasi Alles: a catalogue of all her bookmaking to date. She describes this publication making as a “labour-intensive and meticulous endeavour”, where she often makes use of the analogue format of printed books as a tool to explore recurring subjects of “collecting, archiving, rules, and play”. Recently focusing more on publishing the work of other artists in the field of drawing, Maya’s publications are currently pursuing the display of “intriguing transformations; exploring the concept of regeneration through ‘imperfect’ reproduction”.