About the work

Horizontal widths of colour applied with a broad stroke distinguish this abstract work. Dark blue at the centre of the painting suggests depth and is reminiscent of a landscape. In this painting, Siegward Sprotte has reduced the landscape to such an extent that neither a precise location nor an exact time remains recognisable. The lower area of the painting is brighter and composed with white colour aspects, while the top area is characterised by an intensive blue and yellow colourfulness.

The cognisance of a universally valid landscape experience becomes possible through this strong reduction. Sprotte is here no longer capturing a momentary impression on the image carrier, frozen in an Impressionist manner, but is instead creating a universal statement. The artist is no longer an interpreter of the subjects and atmosphere perceived in nature, but instead allows knowledge of the absolute condition of being. Sprotte himself referred to the knowledge of this actual condition, of the true nature of things as the experience of the “face”: “[It] is completely irrelevant whether you paint an abstract mosaic or a large wave tumbling foaming over itself: you always formatively evoke the origination of a face, as if the painting is awakening from its self-consciousness, becoming a face and speaking with you.”1

 1 Siegward Sprotte, Ateliergespräche, booklet 1, expanded new edition 1978, p. 11, here cited from: Karin Sagner, “Ich glaube an die Farbe als solche”. Siegward Sprottes Werk im Dialog mit Claude Monet und Vincent van Gogh, in: Die Welt farbig sehen. Siegward Sprotte. Retrospektive, ed. Jutta Götzmann and Thomas Gädeke, exhib. cat. Potsdam Museum – Forum für Kunst und Geschichte, Museum of Art and Cultural History in the Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation Schloss Gottorf in Cismar Monastery, 2013, Bönen 2013, pp. 56–71, here: p. 67.