Opening at the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art on Sunday 2 September, 2-5pm, this exhibition explores the work of Daniel Spoerri in relation to Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri his sculpture garden, located near Seggiano, Tuscany.

Born in 1930, Spoerri is a major figure in European post-war art: he was a key member of the Darmstadt Circle of concrete poets, a founder member of the Nouveaux Réalistes and closely associated with the Fluxus movement. He is best known for his ‘snare’ or ‘trap’ pictures, which he began making in 1959. These works present groups of objects “in chance positions, in order or disorder”, such as all the remains of a meal. The objects are fixed exactly as they are found, on the surface they lie. These assemblages are then displayed on the wall as pictures: “gluing together situations that have happened accidentally so that they stay together permanently”. In 1967 he opened the Restaurant Spoerri in Düsseldorf, where he developed what he termed Eat Art. Upstairs from this, in 1970, he opened the Eat-Art-Gallery. His continued explorations developed series’ of assemblage works, with some becoming bronze sculptures, the bronze employed as a further method of permanent fixing, unifying the disparate materials of the assemblages.

In the early 1990s he moved to the village of Seggiano, close to the densely wooded slopes of Monte Amiata, the highest mountain in Tuscany. Here he began work on his sculpture garden, and Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri opened in 1997. It now contains works by fifty artists, including Arman, Karl Gerstner, Nam June Paik, Dieter Roth, Jean Tinguely and Eva Aeppli, as well as works by Spoerri himself, with over a hundred installations in all.

Spoerri chose a motto he had seen at the castle of Oiron, Hic Terminus Haeret, which can be translated as ‘the end (or rather, in this case, ‘transition’) sticks here’, to be placed above the gates to the Giardino. This maxim then makes a thematic connection with the method of his snare-pictures, expanding the sense from these to encompass the ongoing life of the garden.

The exhibition, Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri, at HICA, will explore how this constant concern with the processes of formation manifests in the garden, with context and historical background to Spoerri’s work provided through specific texts, bookworks and concrete poems.

A series of photographs and randomly selected objects and plants from the Giardino highlight the link between the garden and Spoerri’s concerns. Their particular placement within the gallery necessarily reflects also on the context of the exhibition, and of HICA.

Through highlighting the Giardino’s, and HICA’s, rural and remote locations, the exhibition further prompts reflection on the random-seeming, but highly-specific nature of exact results and location, mirroring and expanding on the concerns of the works themselves. The exhibition intends this purposeful development of the contexts, making connection between the Giardino and HICA for the duration of the show. This also achieves a degree of permanence, as some of the objects from the Giardino will be added to HICA’s own garden at the end of the exhibition.

Daniel Spoerri: Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri has been made possible through the assistance of Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri Foundation, and has been supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and The Henry Moore Foundation.

The exhibition runs from 2 September – 7 October and is open on Sundays 2 – 5pm, or by appointment.

Source: HICA