Daniel Spoerri's Garden

DANIEL SPOERRI

Romanian by birth, a victim of Nazi persecution, Daniel Spoerri approached art through dance, mime, and theater. He later opened restaurants and hosted banquets in art galleries, treating critics like waiters. He was a poet and writer, a member of Fluxus, and co-created the MAT editions, art multiples. His fame came thanks to his stay in Paris and his tableaux-pièges, the "trap paintings" from which Spoerri was never able to fully escape. The sculptures in the Seggiano Garden themselves present them cast in bronze and immersed in nature (rather than in the small room of the hotel on Rue Mouffetard), continuing his long-standing vocation for staging: a dynamic theater on the edge of ambiguity between reality and dream, seeking impact, impression, and wonder. After living in New York, on a Greek island, in Dusseldorf, near Paris, and elsewhere, the artist arrived on Mount Amiata in the 1990s, where he developed a park project that finally saw the light of day with the creation of the "Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri. Hic Terminus Haeret" Foundation. In Seggiano, Spoerri puts all his long experience as a "metteur en scene" into practice: it is no coincidence that the park's design is conceived by an artist who is also a profound connoisseur of the Theater of the Absurd. Spoerri's Garden recalls the Sacred Park of Bomarzo, the extravagant sixteenth-century garden commissioned by Vinicio Orsini for his late wife, which had already enthralled the artist since his first visit in 1964. In this installation, Spoerri demonstrates himself not only as a great author, but also as a skilled director, managing to magnificently coordinate his work with that of many other artists. In the park he managed to find a place and a reason to exist for disparate art forms, united by the glue of friendship, but also by a consonance between the poetics of the object and the conceptual, two aspects that we find united in the artist's work.

THE GARDEN 

In southern Tuscany, on the slopes of Mount Amiata, near towns such as Arcidosso, Castel del Piano and not far from Montalcino, lies the small town of Seggiano. This characteristic village, situated on a high hill with an enviable climatic position, opens westwards towards the Maremma onto an immense landscape where the crystalline air on clear days allows a glimpse, in the distance, of the luminous stripe of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is in this town, surrounded by green woods and olive groves, that, thanks to the unique microclimate, an exceptionally delicate oil is produced, extracted from a local cultivar, the "Olivastra Seggianese." Tuscany, however, is a land of art par excellence, where the artistic production of the past has left tangible traces throughout the centuries, in both large and small towns. The latter have been a privileged destination for artists and scholars, often chosen as their homeland precisely because of their isolation and great natural beauty: thus it happens that in places like Seggiano it is possible to find situations of significant artistic interest. It is here, in fact, that alongside the most ancient testimonies belonging to the Gothic-Renaissance stylistic repertoire in which the country is rich, contemporary artistic situations have found space. An internationally renowned artist like Daniel Spoerri, an eclectic figure in the contemporary art scene from the 60s to the present, has chosen to live and pursue his artistic research on a large estate not far from the town of Seggiano: 15 hectares of land where nature, softened in its harshest reliefs, makes a fine display among wide grassy spaces and lush groves, in constant dialogue with the bronze sculptures the artist has placed there, sometimes as their ally, other times as their counterpart. A path winds lightly without a precise physical definition, revealing the presence of the sculptures as one proceeds. At other times, they blend into the natural space or are hidden in the lush vegetation, in a swing of sensations between surprise and enchantment, reminiscent of Renaissance and Baroque gardens, and a hidden intimacy protected from the gaze typical of romantic gardens. Daniel Spoerri has a profound knowledge of historic gardens (it is no coincidence that the destination of his first trip to Italy was the Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo) and of literary texts on gardens such as Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Polifili, a key text for garden designers of the past, a work open to multiple interpretations on which he has long reflected and worked in his teaching activity at the Academies of Fine Arts in Munich and Vienna. From a profound reflection on these themes and on his own artistic journey, a far-reaching environmental work is born here in Seggiano: a creation "in progress" susceptible to expansion and modification, a structure open to other creative experiences: Daniel Spoerri's sculptures are in fact compared with those of other artists, sometimes companions on the journey, who have had a space for their works here. *The driving force, the true "heart" of the park is Daniel Spoerri's home-workshop and the villa on the estate, home to the "Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri" foundation. The foundation's cultural objectives, in addition to the opening and management of this space, include the possibility of staying for study and research purposes for all those working in the field of artistic creativity, completing and integrating what has already been expressed in this area with the sculpture park. (Edited by Manuela Feliziani) Exhibiting at “Il Giardino” with Daniel Spoerri: Eva Aeppli, Eric Dietmann, Katharina Duwen, Alfonso Huppi, Bernhard Luginbuhl, Pavel Schmidt, Ester Seidel and Patrick Steiner, JRSoto, Jean Tinguely, Roland Topor.

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