Siiri Spronken (b. 1960 in Beek, The Netherlands) grew up in a family of artists. After school, she left to study law in Utrecht, and her student room quickly transformed into a painting studio. In 1979 , she was accepted into the Maastricht Art Academy (NL) and has exhibited extensively in the Netherlands and abroad, alone and with her partner, artist Thomas Junghans since. In 2008, her monograph “Making Peace with the Beast” was published, exploring the figure of the lion as the main theme in her work until 2018. Soon after, she began a series of paintings called “Corpus”, an abstract expression of an introspective theme – time – which is still in development. “Who Hunts the Spring”, opening in Milan in September, will be her first exhibition with Cadogan Gallery.
In Siiri Spronken’s works, imagination takes precedence over reality. Exploring the themes of time and transformation, her ‘Corpus’ series reflects on thoughts, feelings and memories mining experience through the lens of time and its effect. The paradox of the moment and timelessness exists in her work – the viewer invades the image ‘in media res’, seeing the artwork without a beginning or end. The artworks breathe, showing and retreating in a constant flux. Spronken embraces this sense of restlessness, creating closeness with it and through this carving out a sense of peace. Always with an element of deceptive simplicity, Spronken paints with a timeless sense of composition; content and form fall together, detailing is absent as the paintings are reduced to their pure essence. Light becomes an internal source of energy in her canvases, illuminating her compositions from within. Time continues in its constant presence as colours emerge from the horizon or loom from the shadows striking in their initial immediacy and their slow blossoming.
This is art that teaches us to think by looking. More feeling than image, they explore the human condition, in which longing for love, loneliness, memories, and the fragility of our existence take center stage. Unspectacular in its spectacular restraint, Siiri Spronken paints a truth that cannot be captured in language. She makes visible something hidden within the human being. The works unlock that deeper truth. Essential in its effect, restrained in its composition, it is art that reveals essence by creating a unity between matter and form.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of Cadogan Gallery
