Siegward Sprotte: Painting

The Atlas Sztuki presentation of Siegward Sprotte’s painting will feature fifty works by an artist whose practice is entirely unknown in Poland, although his works are held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Shanghai Art Museum, the Mellon Collection in Washington, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and major German museums and galleries including the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin Museum, Staatliche Gemäldesammlung in Dresden, Altona Museum in Hamburg, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Stuttgart, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and Potsdam Museum. Most of these venues have also held solo exhibitions of Siegward Sprotte’s work. […]

The Atlas Sztuki exhibition included several early works from the artist’s studies at the Berlin Academy under Emil Orlik and from the period when he took drawing lessons with Karl Hagemeister. Most of the works, however, date from the 1980s and 1990s; several were made after 2000, shortly before the artist’s death. An important aspect of the exhibition is the opportunity to trace Sprotte’s sustained, long-term process of purifying and simplifying his colour compositions—a departure from mimesis towards a calligraphy with the simplicity of a symbol.