Sebastian Spreng
Works & Biography
Paradise Lost, Oil on Canvas, 30 x 30 inches.
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Blue, Oil on Canvas, 30 x 30 inches.
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About Sebastian Spreng
Sebastian Spreng, is a Miami-based artist born in Argentina, who at the early age of 17, had his first solo show at a gallery in Buenos Aires which was sold out at opening night. When he moved to Miami in 1987, the excess of sunshine made him change his approach to painting and his career blossomed. Since then, Spreng has participated in solo and group exhibitions from Boston to Seattle to Munich, Essen to Tokyo. His work is inspired on observations of everyday moments. As a hunter or seeker of color he experiments with colors that vibrate with life. "If I see a photograph or if I watch a movie and I see a color that I like, from that color, I start a new set of paintings," said Sebastian Spreng in an exclusive 2011 WUM interview. "The meaning of my art is a bridge to entice contemplation."
Born in Esperanza, Santa Fe (Argentina) is a self-taught artist and music journalist. He spent his childhood in Esperanza, in the Argentinian countryside (the Pampas) and in the Atlantic Coast in Mar del Plata moving to Buenos Aires in 1973. At age 17 his works were exhibited in Buenos Aires in a group exhibit Artists from Esperanza at the Fundación Lowe. The next year he had his first solo exhibit at Martina Cespedes Gallery in the San Telmo district of the Argentinean capital. The show was sold out on opening night and the gallery held his work exclusively for the next seven years. In 1978 he was the stage-designer for a theater production of Jean Cocteau‘s The Eagle Has Two Heads in Buenos Aires.
During the 1980s, he settled in Miami (Florida) and has been a vital presence in the Florida art scene ever since. Since moving to Florida he had solo and group exhibitions in Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, Toronto, Caracas, Düsseldorf, Essen, Munich, Osaka, Tokyo, Panama, Italy, Buenos Aires, Sarasota, Key West and Miami. His works were included in the University of Miami Lowe Art Museum in the Paradise Lost exhibition, in the Miami-Dade Public Library System and in the show Latin-American Artists from Florida in the Palazzo Mediceo (Medici), Seravezza, Tuscany, Italy in 2002.
His awards include the Hortt Competition at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale and the 1995 Personal Achievement Award from the Muscular Dystrophy Association for the State of Florida. In 1994, he was commissioned by Metro-Dade Art In Public Places to create a permanent exhibition at the Miami-Dade Government Center. The series Nonet for the Long Journey, is a memorial tribute to the American with Disabilities Trailblazers.
In 2009 his work Daphne was selected for the book “Speak for the Trees” along 70 other artists including David Hockney, Christo, April Gornik, Yoko Ono, Julie Heffernan, Robert Longo, Mark Ryden, the Starn Brothers, etc.
Music is usually present in his work and whole series were based on musical structures titled: Liederkreis Opus I and II, Ring Landscapes on Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen,Sinfonietta, Impromptus, Chamber Music and Reverberations. His paintings graced the covers for the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra Playbills, the New World Symphony 1995-96 Season Program Book, the Florida Grand Opera 1998-99 Season Program and CD covers (Henryk Gorecki, Ildebrando Pizzetti and the Grammy Award Da Pacem with works by Arvo Pärt ).
Since 1988 Spreng writes about classical music for magazines and newspapers and is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America.
Solo Exhibitions
Arden Gallery, Boston, Massachussets
“Salad Bar” is the title of the upcoming solo show by Argentinian Miami-based painter Sebastian Spreng, and will be on display in May 2011 at Kelley Roy Gallery in the Wynwood Art District.
Born in Santa Fe in 1956, Sebastian Spreng has a multifaceted career spanning more than four decades of tireless work. His bucolic and enigmatic landscapes are a visual and acoustic experience at once, music being a crucial inspiration for his oeuvre. “In the beginning,” he said, “I was highly moved by the German composers: from Bach to Wagner, Schönberg, and Webern. Then Mozart, Mahler, and Schubert-[the latter] my two favorites-became a perennial presence in my work.”
Paul Klee, C. D. Friedrich, and Rothko appear as the most relevant visual influences for the artist whose work deals with the space, color, and rhyme in a very particular way. Without a doubt, the space is one of the most dramatic components of art, whether visual or acoustic. The tension and dialogue between elements in the composition, as well as the “air” between them, are two of the most creative and powerful resources in art. This vital space, known as interval in music, can be correlated with the distance between the elements in a visual composition.
In Spreng’s oeuvre, vast and desolate spaces are crucial. We see enigmatic landscapes populated most of the time by a lonely tree. This meaningful emptiness that suspends our breath is emphasized by the horizon: liminal space, vortex, existence in extremis, transgression, and possibility. We respond to a synesthetic experience that stimulates all our senses at once, inviting us down a path that has two simultaneous tracks: as we move deep inside the canvas we get deep inside the soul
In a symbolic way, this “smorgasbord” style presentation means a new departure for the artist; it is an atomization of his previous series, the “Liederkreis,” and, in a certain way, there’s a metaphor of destiny suggested here, as avatar and uncertainty, a puzzle-like composition echoing life itself. From an autobiographical standpoint, the series is born of necessity: “It’s a way of concentrating energy in small work, since for physical reasons I can work big less and less. As everything in life, it was born out necessity.”In “Salad Bar,” Spreng adds a new key element: inviting the viewer to become an active participant. Integrated by 250 artworks whose dimensions range from 5″ x 5″ to 8″ x 8″, the show presents the canvases in shelves in a buffet-style look. Transformed into performers, we the viewers are encouraged to rearrange the general composition that, left to the chance, becomes a sort of aleatoric music piece.
“Salad Bar” is a playful invitation into a philosophical introspection about our role in the world, our motivations, dreams, and endeavors. Moreover, it is above all a call for conciliation with nature, art, and ourselves. Bon appétit.
Borges, an inhabitant of libraries that broadened his imagination to the point of showing him the possibility of the Aleph, which concentrates in a minimum diameter all that has been, is, and will be, did not allow novelty to impress him. Besides, he understood that every creator produces a single work over the course of his/her life, and that variations do not annihilate its essential oneness.
In the case of Sebastian Spreng, a single landscape is rendered ad infinitum: the interior of a poetic imagination that gives rise to rivers, seas, ships enveloped in mist, hazy mountains and woods, moons and thresholds of architectures that are spatial-temporal vortices where the modes of creation converge.
Increasingly focused on a small dimension, those paintings of his, which are not informed by an external territory but by the reveries of “a painter who knows (a lot) about music,” give us access to more recondite passageways leading to a poetic iconography modeled by his relationship with this orphic art. Play and mystery or lightness and transcendence might be the signs characterizing his exhibition “Salad Bar” at Kelley Roy Gallery, featuring an installation composed of 240 small-format paintings that may be reorganized into different combinations.
In fact, the installation incites classification. The viewer may notice leitmotifs, such as the recurring figure of a solitary tree on the horizon appearing once and again in a manner of reiteration that evokes that of the melodic phrases that accompany the reappearance of a person or situation, as in Wagner’s operas. And this reading − linked to the possible reorganization of the installation − might allow the creation of successive paintings of trees charged with an archetypal meaning associated to the myths of all times − the figure that connects the subterranean and the celestial − but that are also a type of self-portrait. Spreng admits that the tree he carves with slow movements burying a burin in the fresh paint is “a hymn to the survival of man and to my own survival.”
The last tree he painted in this open series into which he incorporated suggested birds or flowers to the light of his rivers and seas or of solitary fortresses in the open country, was entitled − like Mahler’s composition − The Song of the Earth. But this “earth” is much more than nature; it is a land mediated by the universe of symbols of different cultures, by the history of art itself, and by Spreng’s cognitive relationship with the aforementioned.
In terms of the contemplation of the landscape, we would have to go back to his admiration for the romantic Gaspar David Friedrich and follow along those lines to reach the moon Gerhard Ritcher represented in his monotypes of the Elbe series, or the way in which the latter utilizes his characteristic ‘blur’ to fuse artistic mediums and genres. What is blurred in Spreng’s work is the distinction between reality and reverie, and beyond forms, what he intends to bring up − like music itself − is a time drive. He can contain it in a polyptych featuring the four phases of the moon in colors that refer the viewer to different cultural universes. There is also a temporality − in a way that fuses with his formal explorations − in the gradual blackening of figurative horizons that end up in absolute black or white, those paths towards worldly silence and pictorial construction. In both cases the process is achieved, as in Reinhardt, through the juxtaposition of layers containing a buried memory of color.
A triptych inspired by water contained in rectangles − the swimming pool − is now a grid multiplying light. “There are no swimmers any more, no more water, just the web that light forms at the bottom,” Spreng says. Perhaps what he seeks to attain in his paintings is the drive of the time of myth, in which initiation and the symbolic mediation with life is represented time and again.
The painting titled Keeping Distances (An American Portrait), 2003, sets the stage for these new works by Argentine painter Sebastian Spreng. It also may be considered an introduction to new directions for an artist well known for his solitary swimmers, isolated landscapes, and water imagery. Spreng still works on canvases that are carefully prepared with layers of gesso and pigments that create velvety textures, provocative markings, and ethereal imagery. At the same time he is exploring a more minimalist aesthetic in his works as a means of imbuing them with haunting nostalgia. Keeping Distances refers to the train trip he often took as a child. The memory of the monotonous landscape of the Argentine pampas is revived and captured in repeating frames as Spreng recalls the scenery from the perspective of his new home in the United States and its now familiar and similar landscape: the same landscape rendered by the
Among the many artists who live in south Florida few have contemplated its enviroment with passion and freshness of Sebastian Spreng, a painter born in Buenos Aires in 1956. Spreng came to Miami with an impressive list of triumphs but it was not until he reached Florida that he found the central theme of his work: man’s presence between the faces of the planet-land and sea.
Like a wraith floating on the mirror that divides these two faces, a solitary man swims, stand amid crystalline tides or drifts like a leaf on the sea. At times his presence is no more than a dot amid extensions of turquoise and cobalt. Other times, thee boy larger and nearer, melts in refractions. The point of view is always elevated. Spreng prevents the spectator from identifying with the being who is making this strange element his own. It is an episode in the possession of the world, but it is a wise and subtle possession- it is enough to simply be, contemplate, swim. Between Icarus and Columbus, consciousness with its slender movements saves itself from both tragedy and adventure. Although the body might slide along iridiscent tides, the world becomes the residence of difficult freedoms only when man makes his presence.
The man who navigates between the carnal weight of the earth and the airy levitations of the sea also weaves dream with inmanence. We could say Spreng’s paintings at once lyrical and cerebral describe an intimate re-encounter between man and something he once loved more than himself: harmony with the rest of life. Spreng’s work offer us a mythical vista which at the same time a question. Are we capable of returning to that harmony, that cradle of responsible freedom?.
Spreng articulates the paradox of human Being-although man alone is agent and consciousness, he is but one of life’s beings. All landscape seeks its destiny in reflection, seeks to become the indispensable verb in an idea or an attitude towards life. In the paintings of Spreng the chimera of landfall which we call Florida has accomplished a part of his destiny.
In this porous city, swirling with the accents and customs of many cultures, Sebastian Spreng seems especially at home: a man with a porous imagination who moves freely among the worlds of music, painting and language, multicultural in a way most of us never dream of becoming. “Chamber Music,” Spreng’s show of oil paintings through April 5 at the Americas Collection in Coral Gables , is a splendid example of that rich confluence. His work features atmospheric landscapes with fabulous gardens seen from a distance and shimmering with expanses of water in which a solitary swimmer often floats. They speak of interior worlds where the imagination roams free.
Spreng, who has been confined to a wheelchair since he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age 14, acknowledges that these swimmers are references to the free movement that eludes him except in the water. But, he is quick to add, the landscapes are meant to be poetic metaphors.
“I paint my interior landscapes. By coincidence, [they are] landscapes I’m living now,” he says, referring to Miami’s tropical luxuriance and his attraction to its “strange, oneiric” summer nights. “It’s like what I have inside.”
Even though his work is at times more sweet than compelling, Spreng wields a restrained vocabulary with great sensitivity. And the pieces are, indeed, analogous to the chamber music of the exhibition’s title: intimate and subtle with finely etched repetitions and variations.
The parallels highlight Spreng’s wide-ranging knowledge of classical music. A native of Buenos Aires who moved to Miami in the late 1980s, Spreng, 38, is the Miami correspondent for the glossy magazine Clasica, published in Buenos Aires by Radio Clasica, S. A. (Florida Philharmonic fans may be already familiar with his paintings, which appear on five of the orchestra’s nine playbills this season.)
Even the catalog for the show begins with a poem from James Joyce’s youthfully romantic collection, Chamber Music. The opening lines of the first poem–”Strings in the earth and air / Make music sweet”–inspired American composer Samuel Barber’s 1935 song, whose title is taken from that line; it was one of many songs Barber set to lyric poetry during his career.
“They are exquisite pieces of music,” Spreng says. Making a reference to the lovely, bittersweet quality of the 1935 song, as he does in this show, was a way of putting together music, painting, and literature.
It’s a synthesis Spreng deals with daily, spending some eight hours listening to classical music while painting. And, of course, there is his work for Clasica, which includes interviewing visiting musicians such as violinist Pinchas Zucherman and soprano Barbara Hendricks. “It’s fascinating,” he says of these interviews. “You are in contact with another world. When you by chance mention that you are an artist, that you paint, the whole thing is much more relaxed. I’m not trying to do a critique but to have an interchange of ideas.” What’s equally fascinating is the way music and water have shaped Spreng’s own artistic sensibility. He recalls visiting Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires’ turn-of-the-century opera house, as a high schooler.
“We toured the bowels of the theater. It was like Phantom of the Opera,” he says. “The orchestra was 10 meters above us, playing Wagner, and the music was like water, falling over us, as if you could touch it.
“My love of music started there,” he says. “It was so important in cultivating a sensibility.”
If his feelings for music developed during high school, Spreng’s longing for marine vistas began much earlier, during his childhood in the Santa Fe province. “I was always fascinated by the ocean, always,” he says. “In Argentina I lived in the middle of an ocean of wheat, the pampas.” As a child, he drew and painted obsessively, making maps of imaginary countries. There was much time for these solitary pursuits since Spreng had had trouble walking from the age of 3. For years it was thought he had cancer or tuberculosis; it wasn’t until he was 14 that the MD diagnosis was made.
Only when pressed will he talk about his disability–and then he recounts, in a thin, tense voice, a harrowing tale of a narrow escape from Argentine police during the turbulent 1970s.
Spreng prefers to talk about his newest work, a group of nine 24-inch-by-24-inch paintings commissioned by Metro-Dade’s Art in Public Places program. The works, to be unveiled this fall, will hang in the Stephen P. Clark Government Center as a memorial to George Armitage, a local advocate for the disabled who died in 1991 at the age of 66.
“There will be three levels of three paintings to form a puzzle–like a big painting because I cannot paint big,” Spreng says of his serial composition. “This disadvantage gives me an advantage. I try to see my whole life like this. . . .The lower levels are like webs, labyrinths, jails. The figure inside is very dark. In the upper level, you have this magnificent ocean.” In the ocean Spreng will paint a swimmer, a reference to the one activity in which he himself can move freely.
He’s not concerned that his work will hang in this specific context. “Everybody has some kind of handicap,” he says, adding that the series is really about “the path from darkness to light.” Vivian Rodriguez, executive director of Art in Public Places, agrees. The commissioned works, she says, will make a poetic statement about “dealing with universal disabilities, whether they are physical or from being an imperfect human being.”
Sebastian Spreng has always looked to the serene beauty of nature with her tropical landscapes and azure blue seas, as his inspiration. In this exhibition of recent works, his romantic response to land, sea and sky is enhanced by elusive references to ancient mythology that manifest themselves in quiet luminous voids and tonalities that range from the most subtle to the most dramatic. Laden with symbolic content associated with the marvelous personae of Greek legend, soft and sensuous colors now give way to passionate overtones for seductive effects and allusions to a mysterious content.
To achieve these effects, Spreng applies his colors to finely prepared gesso surfaces. The rich textures that result from this technique augment the imagery while freeing his work from any merely descriptive restraints. The artist transcends the pictorial to create a vision of sublime imagination that harks back to the fantasies of ancient legend. Spreng understands the delicate relationship between experience and imagination and brings it to his work.
Land and sea often appear as a mirage, distorted by the atmosphere and broken flecks of color, while his thick impastos and velvety backgrounds allow the surfaces to retain a strange luminescence. Such effects capture the idyllic mood of legend. Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree in Daphne, 1999, and only a wreath remains. Galatea awaits her fate as a wisp of silent color, and the landscape of nymphs and satyrs come to life as beautiful colors deep within shades of chiaroscuro. The simplicity of his vision is in stark contrast to the depth of his intellectualism. Mythical Pond, 1999, is laden with incipient Romanticism as every brushstroke reverberates with melancholy and mystical experiences. Human passions become relegated to the domain of nature, and man either stands in silent worship or is devoured by her tempestuousness. Even cloud formations and garden vistas are transformed into mysterious abstractions with a rich incandescence. This exhibition reveals the artist’s ability to not only capture every mood, but to invest his paintings with the vagaries of life and drama of the ancients.
Born in 1956, Spreng grew up in Santa Fe, Argentina, and taught himself to be an artist when his mobility was impaired by the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis. By the end of the 1960s, after many years of solitary work, he dominated, among others, the secrets of rendering perspective and architectural details, important aspects of his paintings during those years. Spreng’s first exhibition in 1975, entitled Pueblos blancos, consisted of imaginary depictions of Mediterranean-like villages, full of convincing details but empty of inhabitants. (1)
Around 1983 Spreng went to visit a friend in Miami and decided to stay. The physical freedom he experienced when swimming in the warm Florida waters soon had an impact on his paintings. He became one of the few Latin American artists to make the beaches and the sea of Florida his main subject as swimmers began to appear in his paintings. (2) These small figures, seen from the back and dwarfed by the enormity of the landscape, move in complete solitude through the still waters of rivers, ponds, and especially the sea.
There is a musical quality to Spreng’s work that finds its most evident expression in his landscapes from the 1990s, which he produced in series organized like pieces of chamber music. Spreng, who also writes criticism of classical music, considers music as an important influence. For him, “the act of painting has been like a chase after that special, unique color, the one that sounds right in the right moment, trying to catch it like in an obsessive and passionate game.”(3) Spreng uses color as a musical tonality that makes his images reverberate with a given mood. Thus, his miniature-like paintings of solitary gardens and his images of never-ending seas cradling a lonely swimmer can appeard brooding or infused with light and hope.
Spreng gradually replaced the swimmers by the tree as a symbol for the self immersed in the vastness of nature. The extreme visual condensation and the reduction in size of his recent paintings have intensified their paradoxical qualities rather than neutralize them. At first sight, the expansiveness of the landscape and the resplendent quality of the color seem to go beyond the black boundaries that Spreng paints around his canvases (always to be presented without frames). However, this surrounding darkness also pushes back into the images and renders their luminosity fragile and precarious. For instance, in The Orchard, a lonely tree sits on an empty horizon that hovers over a dark field accented with bright red flowers. The image, in constant struggle with the encroaching dark edges, suggests the fragility of an old photograph that time is evaporating.
Spreng plays with double or even multiple readings that allow for the coexistence in each painting of parallel landscapes. They are at once full of life and marked by doom, peaceful and tense with impending action, full of music and immersed in silence. Even the surface of his works are equivocal, since they appear rough but are sleek to the touch. He achieves this effect by applying up to twenty layers of thin, translucent paint over a thick Russian linen. When the rugged surface of the canvas is left visible, the smoothness of the surface renders it illusory and makes it look like a photographic image of itself.
Spreng believes that the complexity of his images come from trying to depict an interior landscape rather than an exterior one. Perhaps their appeal also lies in the extreme simplification of his motifs which have become archetypes resonating with meaning.
NOTES
1. Sebastián Spreng, interview with the author, 19 May 2001.
2. Ricardo Pau-Llosa, “Entre dos almas: Agua y tierra,” Sebastián Spreng (Caracas: Centro de Arte Euroamericano, 1994): n. p.
3. Sebastián Spreng, Artist Statement, 2001.
Born in Esperanza, Santa Fe (Argentina) is a self-taught artist and music journalist. He spent his childhood in Esperanza, in the Argentinian countryside (the Pampas) and in the Atlantic Coast in Mar del Plata moving to Buenos Aires in 1973. At age 17 his works were exhibited in Buenos Aires in a group exhibit Artists from Esperanza at the Fundación Lowe. The next year he had his first solo exhibit at Martina Cespedes Gallery in the San Telmo district of the Argentinean capital. The show was sold out on opening night and the gallery held his work exclusively for the next seven years. In 1978 he was the stage-designer for a theater production of Jean Cocteau‘s The Eagle Has Two Heads in Buenos Aires.
During the 1980s, he settled in Miami (Florida) and has been a vital presence in the Florida art scene ever since. Since moving to Florida he had solo and group exhibitions in Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, Toronto, Caracas, Düsseldorf, Essen, Munich, Osaka, Tokyo, Panama, Italy, Buenos Aires, Sarasota, Key West and Miami. His works were included in the University of Miami Lowe Art Museum in the Paradise Lost exhibition, in the Miami-Dade Public Library System and in the show Latin-American Artists from Florida in the Palazzo Mediceo (Medici), Seravezza, Tuscany, Italy in 2002.
His awards include the Hortt Competition at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale and the 1995 Personal Achievement Award from the Muscular Dystrophy Association for the State of Florida. In 1994, he was commissioned by Metro-Dade Art In Public Places to create a permanent exhibition at the Miami-Dade Government Center. The series Nonet for the Long Journey, is a memorial tribute to the American with Disabilities Trailblazers.
In 2009 his work Daphne was selected for the book “Speak for the Trees” along 70 other artists including David Hockney, Christo, April Gornik, Yoko Ono, Julie Heffernan, Robert Longo, Mark Ryden, the Starn Brothers, etc.
Music is usually present in his work and whole series were based on musical structures titled: Liederkreis Opus I and II, Ring Landscapes on Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen,Sinfonietta, Impromptus, Chamber Music and Reverberations. His paintings graced the covers for the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra Playbills, the New World Symphony 1995-96 Season Program Book, the Florida Grand Opera 1998-99 Season Program and CD covers (Henryk Gorecki, Ildebrando Pizzetti and the Grammy Award Da Pacem with works by Arvo Pärt ).
Since 1988 Spreng writes about classical music for magazines and newspapers and is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America.
Solo Exhibitions
- 2011- Salad Bar – Kelley Roy Gallery, Wynwood, Miami, Florida
- 2009 – Handmade Horizons & Songs – Kellley Roy Gallery, Wynwood, Miami, Florida
- 2008 – Liederkreis / Op. II – Friesen Gallery, Seattle, Washington
- 2007 – Liederkreis – The Americas Collection, Coral Gables, Florida
- 2006 – Arden Gallery, Boston, Massachussets
- 2005 – Ring Landscapes – Friesen Gallery, Seattle, Washington
- 2004 – Chamber Music Opus 3 – Friesen Gallery, Sun Valley, Idaho
- 2003 – The Americas Collection, Coral Gables, Florida
Arden Gallery, Boston, Massachussets
- 2002 – Seeking Light – Friesen Gallery, Seattle, Washington
- 2001 – Witness – Anthony Ardavin Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
- 2000 – Inner Island – Friesen Gallery, Seattle, Washington
- 1999 – Reverberations – The Americas Collection, Coral Gables, Florida
- 1997 – Oasis - The Americas Collection, Coral Gables, Florida
- 1996 – Galeria Arteconsult, Panama City, Panama
- 1995 – Chamber Music – Anthony Ardavin Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
- 1994 – Centro de Arte Euroamericano, Caracas, Venezuela
- 1993 – Anthony Ardavin Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
- 1992 – Sinfonietta/Impromptus - The Americas Collection, Coral Gables, Florida
- 1991 – Metro-Dade Cultural Resource Center, Government Center, Miami, Florida
- 1990 – Park Gallery, Fort Lauderdale / Boca Raton, Florida
- 1989 – Silent Voyages – Galerie Helene Grubair, Miami, Florida
- 1988 – Spanisches Kulturinstitut in Residenz, Munich, Germany
- 1987 - Galeria Atica, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 1986 – Veranos – Galeria Martina Cespedes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 1982 – Galeria Financiera San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 1981 – Casa de la Cultura, Esperanza, Santa Fe, Argentina
- 1980 – Interiores – Galeria Martina Cespedes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 1979 – Casa de la Cultura, Necochea, Argentina
- 1977 – Variaciones sobre un tema – Galeria Martina Cespedes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 1976 – Pueblos blancos – Galeria Martina Cespedes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 1975 – Galeria Martina Cespedes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
“Salad Bar” is the title of the upcoming solo show by Argentinian Miami-based painter Sebastian Spreng, and will be on display in May 2011 at Kelley Roy Gallery in the Wynwood Art District.
Born in Santa Fe in 1956, Sebastian Spreng has a multifaceted career spanning more than four decades of tireless work. His bucolic and enigmatic landscapes are a visual and acoustic experience at once, music being a crucial inspiration for his oeuvre. “In the beginning,” he said, “I was highly moved by the German composers: from Bach to Wagner, Schönberg, and Webern. Then Mozart, Mahler, and Schubert-[the latter] my two favorites-became a perennial presence in my work.”
Paul Klee, C. D. Friedrich, and Rothko appear as the most relevant visual influences for the artist whose work deals with the space, color, and rhyme in a very particular way. Without a doubt, the space is one of the most dramatic components of art, whether visual or acoustic. The tension and dialogue between elements in the composition, as well as the “air” between them, are two of the most creative and powerful resources in art. This vital space, known as interval in music, can be correlated with the distance between the elements in a visual composition.
In Spreng’s oeuvre, vast and desolate spaces are crucial. We see enigmatic landscapes populated most of the time by a lonely tree. This meaningful emptiness that suspends our breath is emphasized by the horizon: liminal space, vortex, existence in extremis, transgression, and possibility. We respond to a synesthetic experience that stimulates all our senses at once, inviting us down a path that has two simultaneous tracks: as we move deep inside the canvas we get deep inside the soul
In a symbolic way, this “smorgasbord” style presentation means a new departure for the artist; it is an atomization of his previous series, the “Liederkreis,” and, in a certain way, there’s a metaphor of destiny suggested here, as avatar and uncertainty, a puzzle-like composition echoing life itself. From an autobiographical standpoint, the series is born of necessity: “It’s a way of concentrating energy in small work, since for physical reasons I can work big less and less. As everything in life, it was born out necessity.”In “Salad Bar,” Spreng adds a new key element: inviting the viewer to become an active participant. Integrated by 250 artworks whose dimensions range from 5″ x 5″ to 8″ x 8″, the show presents the canvases in shelves in a buffet-style look. Transformed into performers, we the viewers are encouraged to rearrange the general composition that, left to the chance, becomes a sort of aleatoric music piece.
“Salad Bar” is a playful invitation into a philosophical introspection about our role in the world, our motivations, dreams, and endeavors. Moreover, it is above all a call for conciliation with nature, art, and ourselves. Bon appétit.
- Sebastian Spreng by Adriana Herrera
Borges, an inhabitant of libraries that broadened his imagination to the point of showing him the possibility of the Aleph, which concentrates in a minimum diameter all that has been, is, and will be, did not allow novelty to impress him. Besides, he understood that every creator produces a single work over the course of his/her life, and that variations do not annihilate its essential oneness.
In the case of Sebastian Spreng, a single landscape is rendered ad infinitum: the interior of a poetic imagination that gives rise to rivers, seas, ships enveloped in mist, hazy mountains and woods, moons and thresholds of architectures that are spatial-temporal vortices where the modes of creation converge.
Increasingly focused on a small dimension, those paintings of his, which are not informed by an external territory but by the reveries of “a painter who knows (a lot) about music,” give us access to more recondite passageways leading to a poetic iconography modeled by his relationship with this orphic art. Play and mystery or lightness and transcendence might be the signs characterizing his exhibition “Salad Bar” at Kelley Roy Gallery, featuring an installation composed of 240 small-format paintings that may be reorganized into different combinations.
In fact, the installation incites classification. The viewer may notice leitmotifs, such as the recurring figure of a solitary tree on the horizon appearing once and again in a manner of reiteration that evokes that of the melodic phrases that accompany the reappearance of a person or situation, as in Wagner’s operas. And this reading − linked to the possible reorganization of the installation − might allow the creation of successive paintings of trees charged with an archetypal meaning associated to the myths of all times − the figure that connects the subterranean and the celestial − but that are also a type of self-portrait. Spreng admits that the tree he carves with slow movements burying a burin in the fresh paint is “a hymn to the survival of man and to my own survival.”
The last tree he painted in this open series into which he incorporated suggested birds or flowers to the light of his rivers and seas or of solitary fortresses in the open country, was entitled − like Mahler’s composition − The Song of the Earth. But this “earth” is much more than nature; it is a land mediated by the universe of symbols of different cultures, by the history of art itself, and by Spreng’s cognitive relationship with the aforementioned.
In terms of the contemplation of the landscape, we would have to go back to his admiration for the romantic Gaspar David Friedrich and follow along those lines to reach the moon Gerhard Ritcher represented in his monotypes of the Elbe series, or the way in which the latter utilizes his characteristic ‘blur’ to fuse artistic mediums and genres. What is blurred in Spreng’s work is the distinction between reality and reverie, and beyond forms, what he intends to bring up − like music itself − is a time drive. He can contain it in a polyptych featuring the four phases of the moon in colors that refer the viewer to different cultural universes. There is also a temporality − in a way that fuses with his formal explorations − in the gradual blackening of figurative horizons that end up in absolute black or white, those paths towards worldly silence and pictorial construction. In both cases the process is achieved, as in Reinhardt, through the juxtaposition of layers containing a buried memory of color.
A triptych inspired by water contained in rectangles − the swimming pool − is now a grid multiplying light. “There are no swimmers any more, no more water, just the web that light forms at the bottom,” Spreng says. Perhaps what he seeks to attain in his paintings is the drive of the time of myth, in which initiation and the symbolic mediation with life is represented time and again.
- Sebastián Spreng. Author: Carol Damian. ArtNexus No. 50 – Sep 2003
The painting titled Keeping Distances (An American Portrait), 2003, sets the stage for these new works by Argentine painter Sebastian Spreng. It also may be considered an introduction to new directions for an artist well known for his solitary swimmers, isolated landscapes, and water imagery. Spreng still works on canvases that are carefully prepared with layers of gesso and pigments that create velvety textures, provocative markings, and ethereal imagery. At the same time he is exploring a more minimalist aesthetic in his works as a means of imbuing them with haunting nostalgia. Keeping Distances refers to the train trip he often took as a child. The memory of the monotonous landscape of the Argentine pampas is revived and captured in repeating frames as Spreng recalls the scenery from the perspective of his new home in the United States and its now familiar and similar landscape: the same landscape rendered by the
- Art Papers Magazine. December 1991. Ricardo Pau-Llosa. Metro Dade Cultural Resource Center, Miami, Florida
Among the many artists who live in south Florida few have contemplated its enviroment with passion and freshness of Sebastian Spreng, a painter born in Buenos Aires in 1956. Spreng came to Miami with an impressive list of triumphs but it was not until he reached Florida that he found the central theme of his work: man’s presence between the faces of the planet-land and sea.
Like a wraith floating on the mirror that divides these two faces, a solitary man swims, stand amid crystalline tides or drifts like a leaf on the sea. At times his presence is no more than a dot amid extensions of turquoise and cobalt. Other times, thee boy larger and nearer, melts in refractions. The point of view is always elevated. Spreng prevents the spectator from identifying with the being who is making this strange element his own. It is an episode in the possession of the world, but it is a wise and subtle possession- it is enough to simply be, contemplate, swim. Between Icarus and Columbus, consciousness with its slender movements saves itself from both tragedy and adventure. Although the body might slide along iridiscent tides, the world becomes the residence of difficult freedoms only when man makes his presence.
The man who navigates between the carnal weight of the earth and the airy levitations of the sea also weaves dream with inmanence. We could say Spreng’s paintings at once lyrical and cerebral describe an intimate re-encounter between man and something he once loved more than himself: harmony with the rest of life. Spreng’s work offer us a mythical vista which at the same time a question. Are we capable of returning to that harmony, that cradle of responsible freedom?.
Spreng articulates the paradox of human Being-although man alone is agent and consciousness, he is but one of life’s beings. All landscape seeks its destiny in reflection, seeks to become the indispensable verb in an idea or an attitude towards life. In the paintings of Spreng the chimera of landfall which we call Florida has accomplished a part of his destiny.
- March 1995 Miami Herald. WRITING AND PAINTING ABOUT CHAMBER MUSIC: ARGENTINE ARTIST ONLY BOUND BY WHEELCHAIR by Elisa Turner
In this porous city, swirling with the accents and customs of many cultures, Sebastian Spreng seems especially at home: a man with a porous imagination who moves freely among the worlds of music, painting and language, multicultural in a way most of us never dream of becoming. “Chamber Music,” Spreng’s show of oil paintings through April 5 at the Americas Collection in Coral Gables , is a splendid example of that rich confluence. His work features atmospheric landscapes with fabulous gardens seen from a distance and shimmering with expanses of water in which a solitary swimmer often floats. They speak of interior worlds where the imagination roams free.
Spreng, who has been confined to a wheelchair since he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age 14, acknowledges that these swimmers are references to the free movement that eludes him except in the water. But, he is quick to add, the landscapes are meant to be poetic metaphors.
“I paint my interior landscapes. By coincidence, [they are] landscapes I’m living now,” he says, referring to Miami’s tropical luxuriance and his attraction to its “strange, oneiric” summer nights. “It’s like what I have inside.”
Even though his work is at times more sweet than compelling, Spreng wields a restrained vocabulary with great sensitivity. And the pieces are, indeed, analogous to the chamber music of the exhibition’s title: intimate and subtle with finely etched repetitions and variations.
The parallels highlight Spreng’s wide-ranging knowledge of classical music. A native of Buenos Aires who moved to Miami in the late 1980s, Spreng, 38, is the Miami correspondent for the glossy magazine Clasica, published in Buenos Aires by Radio Clasica, S. A. (Florida Philharmonic fans may be already familiar with his paintings, which appear on five of the orchestra’s nine playbills this season.)
Even the catalog for the show begins with a poem from James Joyce’s youthfully romantic collection, Chamber Music. The opening lines of the first poem–”Strings in the earth and air / Make music sweet”–inspired American composer Samuel Barber’s 1935 song, whose title is taken from that line; it was one of many songs Barber set to lyric poetry during his career.
“They are exquisite pieces of music,” Spreng says. Making a reference to the lovely, bittersweet quality of the 1935 song, as he does in this show, was a way of putting together music, painting, and literature.
It’s a synthesis Spreng deals with daily, spending some eight hours listening to classical music while painting. And, of course, there is his work for Clasica, which includes interviewing visiting musicians such as violinist Pinchas Zucherman and soprano Barbara Hendricks. “It’s fascinating,” he says of these interviews. “You are in contact with another world. When you by chance mention that you are an artist, that you paint, the whole thing is much more relaxed. I’m not trying to do a critique but to have an interchange of ideas.” What’s equally fascinating is the way music and water have shaped Spreng’s own artistic sensibility. He recalls visiting Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires’ turn-of-the-century opera house, as a high schooler.
“We toured the bowels of the theater. It was like Phantom of the Opera,” he says. “The orchestra was 10 meters above us, playing Wagner, and the music was like water, falling over us, as if you could touch it.
“My love of music started there,” he says. “It was so important in cultivating a sensibility.”
If his feelings for music developed during high school, Spreng’s longing for marine vistas began much earlier, during his childhood in the Santa Fe province. “I was always fascinated by the ocean, always,” he says. “In Argentina I lived in the middle of an ocean of wheat, the pampas.” As a child, he drew and painted obsessively, making maps of imaginary countries. There was much time for these solitary pursuits since Spreng had had trouble walking from the age of 3. For years it was thought he had cancer or tuberculosis; it wasn’t until he was 14 that the MD diagnosis was made.
Only when pressed will he talk about his disability–and then he recounts, in a thin, tense voice, a harrowing tale of a narrow escape from Argentine police during the turbulent 1970s.
Spreng prefers to talk about his newest work, a group of nine 24-inch-by-24-inch paintings commissioned by Metro-Dade’s Art in Public Places program. The works, to be unveiled this fall, will hang in the Stephen P. Clark Government Center as a memorial to George Armitage, a local advocate for the disabled who died in 1991 at the age of 66.
“There will be three levels of three paintings to form a puzzle–like a big painting because I cannot paint big,” Spreng says of his serial composition. “This disadvantage gives me an advantage. I try to see my whole life like this. . . .The lower levels are like webs, labyrinths, jails. The figure inside is very dark. In the upper level, you have this magnificent ocean.” In the ocean Spreng will paint a swimmer, a reference to the one activity in which he himself can move freely.
He’s not concerned that his work will hang in this specific context. “Everybody has some kind of handicap,” he says, adding that the series is really about “the path from darkness to light.” Vivian Rodriguez, executive director of Art in Public Places, agrees. The commissioned works, she says, will make a poetic statement about “dealing with universal disabilities, whether they are physical or from being an imperfect human being.”
- Sebastían Spreng, The Americas Collection, Miami, Florida. Author: Carol Damian. ArtNexus No. 36 – May 2000
Sebastian Spreng has always looked to the serene beauty of nature with her tropical landscapes and azure blue seas, as his inspiration. In this exhibition of recent works, his romantic response to land, sea and sky is enhanced by elusive references to ancient mythology that manifest themselves in quiet luminous voids and tonalities that range from the most subtle to the most dramatic. Laden with symbolic content associated with the marvelous personae of Greek legend, soft and sensuous colors now give way to passionate overtones for seductive effects and allusions to a mysterious content.
To achieve these effects, Spreng applies his colors to finely prepared gesso surfaces. The rich textures that result from this technique augment the imagery while freeing his work from any merely descriptive restraints. The artist transcends the pictorial to create a vision of sublime imagination that harks back to the fantasies of ancient legend. Spreng understands the delicate relationship between experience and imagination and brings it to his work.
Land and sea often appear as a mirage, distorted by the atmosphere and broken flecks of color, while his thick impastos and velvety backgrounds allow the surfaces to retain a strange luminescence. Such effects capture the idyllic mood of legend. Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree in Daphne, 1999, and only a wreath remains. Galatea awaits her fate as a wisp of silent color, and the landscape of nymphs and satyrs come to life as beautiful colors deep within shades of chiaroscuro. The simplicity of his vision is in stark contrast to the depth of his intellectualism. Mythical Pond, 1999, is laden with incipient Romanticism as every brushstroke reverberates with melancholy and mystical experiences. Human passions become relegated to the domain of nature, and man either stands in silent worship or is devoured by her tempestuousness. Even cloud formations and garden vistas are transformed into mysterious abstractions with a rich incandescence. This exhibition reveals the artist’s ability to not only capture every mood, but to invest his paintings with the vagaries of life and drama of the ancients.
- Sebastián Spreng. Atlanta, Georgia. Author: Florencia Bazzano-Nelson. ArtNexus No. 42 – Nov 2002
Born in 1956, Spreng grew up in Santa Fe, Argentina, and taught himself to be an artist when his mobility was impaired by the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis. By the end of the 1960s, after many years of solitary work, he dominated, among others, the secrets of rendering perspective and architectural details, important aspects of his paintings during those years. Spreng’s first exhibition in 1975, entitled Pueblos blancos, consisted of imaginary depictions of Mediterranean-like villages, full of convincing details but empty of inhabitants. (1)
Around 1983 Spreng went to visit a friend in Miami and decided to stay. The physical freedom he experienced when swimming in the warm Florida waters soon had an impact on his paintings. He became one of the few Latin American artists to make the beaches and the sea of Florida his main subject as swimmers began to appear in his paintings. (2) These small figures, seen from the back and dwarfed by the enormity of the landscape, move in complete solitude through the still waters of rivers, ponds, and especially the sea.
There is a musical quality to Spreng’s work that finds its most evident expression in his landscapes from the 1990s, which he produced in series organized like pieces of chamber music. Spreng, who also writes criticism of classical music, considers music as an important influence. For him, “the act of painting has been like a chase after that special, unique color, the one that sounds right in the right moment, trying to catch it like in an obsessive and passionate game.”(3) Spreng uses color as a musical tonality that makes his images reverberate with a given mood. Thus, his miniature-like paintings of solitary gardens and his images of never-ending seas cradling a lonely swimmer can appeard brooding or infused with light and hope.
Spreng gradually replaced the swimmers by the tree as a symbol for the self immersed in the vastness of nature. The extreme visual condensation and the reduction in size of his recent paintings have intensified their paradoxical qualities rather than neutralize them. At first sight, the expansiveness of the landscape and the resplendent quality of the color seem to go beyond the black boundaries that Spreng paints around his canvases (always to be presented without frames). However, this surrounding darkness also pushes back into the images and renders their luminosity fragile and precarious. For instance, in The Orchard, a lonely tree sits on an empty horizon that hovers over a dark field accented with bright red flowers. The image, in constant struggle with the encroaching dark edges, suggests the fragility of an old photograph that time is evaporating.
Spreng plays with double or even multiple readings that allow for the coexistence in each painting of parallel landscapes. They are at once full of life and marked by doom, peaceful and tense with impending action, full of music and immersed in silence. Even the surface of his works are equivocal, since they appear rough but are sleek to the touch. He achieves this effect by applying up to twenty layers of thin, translucent paint over a thick Russian linen. When the rugged surface of the canvas is left visible, the smoothness of the surface renders it illusory and makes it look like a photographic image of itself.
Spreng believes that the complexity of his images come from trying to depict an interior landscape rather than an exterior one. Perhaps their appeal also lies in the extreme simplification of his motifs which have become archetypes resonating with meaning.
NOTES
1. Sebastián Spreng, interview with the author, 19 May 2001.
2. Ricardo Pau-Llosa, “Entre dos almas: Agua y tierra,” Sebastián Spreng (Caracas: Centro de Arte Euroamericano, 1994): n. p.
3. Sebastián Spreng, Artist Statement, 2001.
