by Redazione , published on 10/08/2025
Categories: Books
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From Aug. 3 to Nov. 3, 2025, the Daniel Spoerri Garden will host a photography exhibition and the presentation of the volume Poesiealbum, a tribute to the late artist in the place he transformed into a total work and chose as his permanent home.
In the Tuscan Maremma, in Seggiano (Grosseto), the Garden of Daniel Spoerri is preparing to host a double commemorative event: a photography exhibition and the presentation of the volume Poesiealbum. Homage to Daniel Spoerri, curated by Anna Mazzanti and Susanne Neumann. The initiative, scheduled from Aug. 3 to Nov. 3, 2025, pays tribute to the figure of the artist who died in November 2023 at the age of 94, restoring the biographical, artistic and emotional dimensions of a place that Spoerri transformed into a total work of art and chose as his final resting place.
The Garden, which covers 16 hectares, is currently home to 115 works, arranged along paths surrounded by vegetation. About half bear Spoerri’s signature, while the remainder belong to artists who shared life or work experiences with him. It is a composite collection that has stratified over time, according to affective relationships, shared planning and common visions. The choice to rest in this place unequivocally tells of Spoerri’s identity and the central role the Garden played in his existence.
“Supporting events dedicated to Daniel Spoerri,” says Gabriele Gori, Director General of Fondazione CR Firenze, “means for the Foundation to enhance an extraordinary cutural heritage rooted in the Grosseto area. Initiatives such as this, which unite artistic memory, landscape and community, fully embody our mission to promote a culture that is widespread, accessible and rooted in places.”
It is no coincidence that the area, formerly known as Paradise, was chosen by Spoerri to carry out an immersive art project. The area, in the southern part of Tuscany, maintains a peculiar balance between the built and the natural environment, a quality that has deeply attracted the artist from his first encounter with the place. After a long career focused on urban and industrial culture, between Paris, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Zurich and Vienna, Spoerri decided to leave his post at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1990s to devote himself entirely to the Garden. Since then, although he moved to Vienna in 2007, he constantly returned to Seggiano, particularly to oversee the creation of such striking works as the Prillwitzer Idoles or the series erst letzt das erste.
If the poetics of reuse has accompanied Spoerri since his famous tableaux-pièges (trap paintings), in the Garden we see a significant transformation of his language. Here more classical materials dominate, such as bronze, marble and stone, embedded in the landscape but also in tension with the cyclical nature. In them the artist continues to entrap chance, but he does so with a new focus on permanence and relationship to the environment. The Latin motto chosen as the Foundation’s title, Hic Terminus Haeret (“Here the Boundaries Adhere”), recalls this profound adherence to a place that becomes margin and center, threshold and final abode.
Daniel Spoerri sitting on his first bronze work, Santo Grappa (1970), 1997 The Garden of Daniel Spoerri, Seggiano
The vision of the Garden as a choral work guided Spoerri from the earliest stages of the project, promoting posthumous interventions based on unrealized projects in his lifetime, as in the case of Meret Oppenheim, Roland Topor or the tribute to Joseph Beuys. Sometimes the works were modified by Spoerri himself to fit the landscape context. The presence of figures like Jean Tinguely and Eva Aeppli, linked to the Parisian years and the author’s artistic turning point after an early career as a dancer at the Bern Opera, testifies to the continuity of a human and creative path that spans the entire second half of the 20th century.
The Garden, today, is a landscape dotted with signs: some works seem to dissolve into the green, others stand out like visual signs at the highest points. Together they restore Spoerri’s profound intention to create an enveloping self-portrait, a living installation that tells his existential parable, his reflection on time, memory, and environmental sustainability. It is also, inevitably, a fragment of recent art history, an open-air museum that continuously questions the visitor. It is no coincidence that many have called it a three-dimensional Poesiealbum .
The image guides the entire exhibition project. In the central hall of the village, the exhibition brings together about one hundred photographs, mostly from the Garden’s archives. The accompanying volume offers a narrative in images of the process of building the park and the role Spoerri played over time. The artist is often featured in the shots, with his camera slung over his shoulder, or portrayed as he closely follows the installation of new works. The photographs seek to restore the visual diary character of the Garden: a space traversed, inhabited, modified.
Many of the images on display were made with different tools, by professional photographers but also in an amateur way. Some are in black and white, others in color; in each case they return a variety of perspectives and formats that contribute to the polyphonic nature of the project. The artist’s gaze, in particular, guides the narrative, emphasizing Spoerri’s constant presence behind each stage of creation. The Garden, in this reading, appears as a work in the making, a layered construction of experiences, relationships, insights.
Poesiealbum is also a book of memories destined to last: it contains stories of encounters, accounts of friendships and collaborations, fragments of a journey that continues to inspire. A further layering of meaning is added with the publication, which fixes on paper the echo of a work designed to transform with time. The project received support from the Fondazione CR Firenze, as part of its philanthropic activities in favor of the third sector in the fields of art, culture, the environment, research and education. A contribution that made possible this new stage in the story of a unique work, whose memory continues to sediment in the paths of a Garden that remains deeply marked by the presence of those who imagined it.
A “Poesiealbum” for Daniel Spoerri: exhibition and book in the Garden where the artist rests
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