A journey from south to north, from Val Badia to the German North Sea island of Sylt. This is what awaits visitors to the exhibition ‘Siegward Sprotte. North south, the geography of art”, which opened this year – twenty years after the death of the artist (1913-2004) – at the Museum Ladin Ciastel de Tor in San Martin de Tor. The German painter’s connection with Val Badia began in 1936, when Sprotte came to Colfosco by chance, and he returned here again and again in the decades that followed. The municipality of St. Martin in Thurn awarded him honorary citizenship in 2003, the museum celebrated him with an exhibition at the time and still owns a collection of works that the artist bequeathed to it over the course of his life.
‘North and south. Sea and mountains. Colour and form. These are the contrasts that Sprotte brings into dialogue with the utmost naturalness’. This is how curator Phil Mer summarises the themes of the exhibition. The painter, who expressly does not describe himself as a landscape painter, makes it clear that his pictures do not depict what his eyes see. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that he did not normally paint the landscape that surrounded him en plein air. He painted the sea when he was in the mountains or, conversely, the mountains when he was at home on the North Sea. ‘This is typical of an experienced artist who internalises and recalls what he absorbs and sees when he devotes himself to his art,’ Phil Mer emphasises. And in contrast to a typical phenomenon in art history, where a painter’s colours become more vibrant and flaming after a trip to the south, Sprotte finds the dominant colour of his palette in the north and the anatomy of form in the south. In the mountains, Sprotte’s colours are darker, his brushstrokes sparser but all the more decisive. Paradoxically, he chooses warmer colours for the north and colder colours for the south.
The medieval castle tower also has a north and a south: two separate rooms, a south room with pictures of trees, whipped by the wind and pressed down by masses of snow, stylised firs and pines and a north room with the island of Sylt and the energy of the waves.
The exhibition can be seen until the end of September.
The installation TOR by Lois Anvidalfarei was presented in the new building next to the castle: it consists of the bronze figure ‘Fallender’ – one of six that the Gadertal artist created in 2013 for the Conditio Humana cycle, which hangs in a structure made of scaffolding tubes. It is a work about existence between physical strength, mastery, endurance and failure, or as Anvidalfarei puts it: ‘Man in his transience: although life is fleeting and fallible, the longing for its perfection is the origin of a high principle’.
The Museum Ladin acquired the now permanent installation in collaboration with the Biennale for Art in Public Space SMACH through a call for tenders from the Italian Ministry of Culture.