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the way

Willi Siber 1980 - 2020

Museum Villa Rot is happy to present the first retrospective of German artist Willi Siber. For the first time – on the occasion of the artist’s 70th birthday – works from four decades are brought together in a comprehensive show illustrating Siber’s remarkable artistic development.

03.11.19
02.02.20

After studying at Stuttgart Art Academy in the 1980s, Siber first gained public attention in the art world with his gestural and expressive paintings.

During that period, he began to experiment with chainsaw and wood and created his first sculptures, which paved the way for his future career.

His meticulous approach to materials led him to the development of the well-known knobs and grid works of the 1990s and to a very individual and distinctive artistic language. National and international galleries became aware of him and have since exhibited his work in numerous exhibitions and at many art fairs.

At the turn of the millennium, Siber got into contact with another essential material for his work. During a studio stay in Amsterdam he discovered the versatile epoxy resin, which he could not only use as colorant for paintings and wall objects, but also as autonomous plastic material. Subsequently, the artist started transforming wood splinters, nails or plastic elements into unique and multi-faceted objects with epoxy coatings.

After 2010, the artist surprised his audience with another material. Long steel tubes, sprayed with car paint, appear to bend like straws and move almost weightlessly in space. Indeed, these polished, shiny sculptures seem to contrast with the anthropomorphic wooden sculptures of the 1980s, but both of them emphasize Siber’s artistic approach to examining the suggestive power of color and human perception.

These aspects are also found in Siber’s current concave-convex objects that he completes with so-called ‘flip flop’ or interference paint. They impressively demonstrate the possibilities of using color in contemporary sculpting.