Siegward Sprotte: Painting

Presenting Siegward Sprotte's painting in Atlas Sztuki, we will show 50 works by the artist. An artist whose work is completely unknown in Poland, although his works are in the collections of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Shanghai Art Museum, the Mellon Collection in Washington, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the Carnegie Institute of Art in Pittsburgh and in important German museums and galleries such as: Berlinische Galerie, Berlin Museum, Staatliche Gemäldesammlung in Dresden, Altona Museum in Hamburg, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Stuttgart, Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe and Potsdam Museum. In most of the listed places, individual exhibitions of Siegward Sprotte were also held.

In order to bring the silhouette of the artist who died in 2004 closer, we publish two essays devoted to his work in the catalogue. The author of the first one is prof. Peter O. Scholz, an art historian who has been dividing his time between scientific and teaching work at universities in Poland, Germany and Austria for several years. In his emotional essay, full of references and digressions, he evaluates contemporary avant-garde art, analyzing the work of Siegward Sprotte. The second text was written by prof. Rainer K. Wick from Wuppertal University. Author from other than prof. Scholz perspective looks at the work of the German artist. The whole is completed by a text-manifesto by Siegward Sprotte, a manifesto that, despite the passage of time, does not lose its relevance. At the exhibition in Atlas Sztuki, we will show some of the artist's early works - from the period of his studies at the Berlin Academy under the direction of Emil Orlik and the times when he took drawing lessons from Karl Hagemeister. However, most of the works come from the 1980s and 1990s; several works were created after 2000, just before the artist's death. An important aspect of our exhibition will be the possibility of tracing the long-term, constant process of purifying and simplifying the composition of colours in Sprotty's works - the process of moving away from mimeticism in favor of calligraphy with the simplicity of the symbol. I invite you to visit Siegward Sprotte's exhibition in Atlas Sztuki, because I am deeply convinced that it will be a meeting with the original painting.