This mid-career survey was a new retrospective of work from renowned local artist Henry Leo Schoebel presented by guest curator Robert Pela.

“The work in the exhibition from the early 90s is oil on wood-panel,” Schoebel said. “Later work employs a water-based urethane medium. In some paintings, I’ve added automotive flake (in layman’s terms, a very fine glitter) within the final urethane clear coats.”
Some of the artist’s urethane-based paintings feature fields of Swarovski crystals distributed over their surfaces, while more recent paintings employ an acrylic/pumice medium."

Schoebel, Professor of Painting and Drawing at ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, is hesitant to take credit for “making art,” he said. “I don’t know that I ever have made any art, however, I’ve made a lot of paintings. Some of them, I hope, are not so bad.”
In reviewing the work selected for the exhibition, Schoebel found a unifying theme in his art. “I think if there is one word that can tie all this work together,” he said, “it would be ‘desire.’ My imagery and painting methodology are attempts, I think, to produce work that is materially and conceptually transcendent. I often employ strategies with inherent executional risks. A single poorly-executed paint mark, one that is impossible to correct, is enough to ruin a painting I have worked on for weeks.”