About the work

From cave paintings through antiquity, the Renaissance and the Baroque to the Realism of the 19th century, European art history developed from a symbolic form of expression to ever more complex pictorial compositions. Outside of Europe, especially in the Arabic realm extending to East Asia, symbolic reductions continued to develop over the centuries. There, highly symbolic, reduced representations exist next to complex, narrative works imitating reality. Europe discovered the art of the Far East in the second half of the 19th century. Many artists oriented themselves directly to the art of the Orient. The interest of the young Siegward Sprotte in the art of East Asia, especially in calligraphy, was aroused in the context of intensive study of the aphorisms of the Chinese philosopher Laozi.
Sprotte did in fact intensively explore Chinese ink painting, but rigorously rejected the idea of merely representing a detail. Instead, he adopted the technique of reduction, of symbolic reproduction for his holistic representations of landscapes. The artist deployed his reduced pictorial language for the representation of larger contexts. The simplification of the pictorial means was the objective in the art of Siegward Sprotte. In this way he was able to reduce that seen to perfectly to such an extent that the greater whole was preserved and elucidated. In the few characters and brush strokes Sprotte used, he was able to allow the power of the whole to appear.