Sebastian Spreng

Sebastian Spreng (born April 6, 1956) is an Argentine-born American visual artist and music journalist. He is a self-taught artist. He lives in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida.[1]

Sebastian Spreng
Sebastian Spreng 2008
Born (1956-04-06) April 6, 1956
Esperanza, Santa Fe, Argentina
NationalityArgentine
Known forPainting, music, stage designer, opera, journalism, diarist
Delicate Balance Installation/Private Collection

Early life

Sebastian Spreng was born on April 6, 1956 in Esperanza, Santa Fe in Argentina[1] and is of Swiss and German ancestry. He is related from his maternal side to writer Eduardo Gudiño Kieffer (1935–2002). He spent his childhood in is hometown Esperanza in the Argentinian countryside (the Pampas) and in the Atlantic Coast in Mar del Plata moving with his family 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.

Career

In 1978 he was the stage-designer for a theater production of Jean Cocteau's L'aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle Has Two Heads) starring Miguel Angel Sola and Bárbara Mujica in Buenos Aires and worked also an illustrator and designer.

In 1987, he settled in Miami, Florida and has been a vital presence in the Florida art scene.[1][2]

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, Santa Fe, New Mexico 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, since earlier childhood, Spreng suffers from muscular dystrophy.[3]

In 1994, he was commissioned by Metro-Dade Art In Public Places to create a permanent exhibition at the Miami-Dade Government Center.[3] The series Nonet for the Long Journey, is a memorial tribute to the American with Disabilities Trailblazers. In 1998 (and 2004), Christie's New York City auctioned his works among other Latin American Masters and his name was included in the book "Leonard's Price Index Latin American Art at Auction" by Susan Theran.

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, and others.

In 2012, he was selected as one of the "100 Latinos of Miami", along other personalities,[4] and as the 2013 Visual Artist of the 11th Edition of the Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival in Atherton, California.[5]

For his contributions and merits in the South Florida art scene, he was awarded the Dr. Sanford L. and Beatrice Ziff Outstanding Arts by Classical South Florida of 2015.

Since 2015 he works in IPad drawings presenting exhibitions totally dedicated to digital art in Miami,[6] Santa Fe, and Panama. The series Das Lied von der Erde,[7] based in Gustav Mahler song cycle comprised more than twenty Ipad drawings in several sizes.

In 2017 was named "Knight Champion of the Arts" by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation[8][9] and his works exhibited at the Knight Hall in the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

At the Lowe Art Museum an exhibition about the destruction of Dresden consisting in iPad drawings printed on aluminum took place between March and September 2018.[10][11]

Work

Music is usually present in his work and whole series were based on musical structures titled: Liederkreis Opus I and II (based on two song cycles by Robert Schumann, his Liederkreis, Op. 24 and Liederkreis, Op. 39), Ring Landscapes on Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, Sinfonietta, Impromptus, Chamber Music and Reverberations. As a result, many were chosen as cover illustrations for the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra Playbills, along with the New World Symphony 1995-96 Season Program Book, the Florida Grand Opera 1998-99 Season Program and Poster and other local music organizations as Seraphic Fire, Mainly Mozart Festival and as CD covers in recordings of, among others, composer Henryk Gorecki, Astor Piazzolla, Ildebrando Pizzetti and the Grammy Award Da Pacem with works by Arvo Pärt.

Since 1988 Spreng writes about Classical music for magazines, newspapers and his blog Miami Clasica. His career writing about music began as foreign correspondent for Clásica Magazine, Argentina. He is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America and as music journalist he interviewed, among others personalities in that field, composer Luciano Berio, conductors Donald Runnicles, Nicholas McGegan, James Judd, Pablo Heras-Casado, Ramón Tebar and Michael Tilson Thomas; director Harold Prince, singers Dawn Upshaw, Montserrat Caballé, Renata Scotto, Thomas Hampson, Barbara Hendricks, Evelyn Lear, Thomas Stewart (bass-baritone), Anne Sofie von Otter, Luca Pisaroni, Christine Brewer, Bernarda Fink and Deborah Voigt; pianist Evgeny Kissin, Javier Perianes, Jean-Yves Thibaudet; cellists David Finckel, Sol Gabetta and Amit Peled, violinists Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham, Pinchas Zukerman and the Emerson String Quartet.

References
  1. "Sebastian Spreng Biography". Artnet.com. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  2. "Sebastian Spreng - Handmade Horizons and Songs". Artpulse Magazine. 2009. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  3. Tschida, Anne (May 13, 2011). "Sebastian Spreng's lively produce". Knight Foundation. Retrieved 2021-01-18. commissioned to create a public work for Miami-Dade Art in Public Places, a tribute he created for the “American with Disabilities Trailblazers.” Spreng has muscular dystrophy
  4. "Listado 100 Latinos Miami 2011-2012". 100latinos.com. 2011. Archived from the original on 2013-05-02. Retrieved 2012-10-31.
  5. "Music@Menlo |". musicatmenlo.org. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  6. Chuchla, Ross (March 27, 2015). "A Collaboration of Music and Art". SeraphicFire.org. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  7. mahler’s das lied von der erde…a song for the earth (PDF). 2015.
  8. "On its 10th anniversary, Knight Arts Challenge Miami funds 43 projects with $2.5 million". Knight Foundation. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  9. Wooldridge, Jane (December 4, 2017). "Knight Arts Challenge names these artists — and South Florida — winners". Miami Herald. Archived from the original on 2018-03-18. Retrieved 2020-01-17.
  10. https://www.lowe.miami.edu/exhibitions/sebastian-spreng-dresden/index.html
  11. Herrera, Adriana (May 17, 2018). "Sebastian Spreng: Cantos para exorcisar la catastrofe". El Nuevo Herald (in Spanish).
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