Lorenz Spring
Born in 1964.
After training as a stone sculptor in Bern, pursued in parallel at the School of Applied Arts, he worked from 1984 to 1988 on the restoration and execution of Baroque monuments. He turned to painting in 1988, the year he spent time in Paris and held his first major solo exhibition at the Loeb Gallery in Bern. His career thus brings together stonework, painting, drawing and the object.
His works often combine painting and writing, popular imagery and motifs drawn from art history. In the 1990s, his “shoe paintings” transformed ordinary objects into figures and narratives. The gallerist Carzaniga describes this iconography as an exploration of human myths, errors and happiness, and notes the tension between humour and social seriousness.
Spring addresses materialism, vanity and isolation in particular. He employs mixed media; work notices document acrylic, dispersion, chalk, collage and oil, among other techniques.
From 2006 onwards, flowers and water lilies became major subjects. The Hirslanden Klinik, which preserves and presents the work Seerosen (2007), describes large-format compositions in which abstract floral forms and green traces unfold against coloured backgrounds. Monet constitutes a point of reference, but the artist privileges the interplay of colours and a non-realistic interpretation of nature.
His work is also represented in the collections of the Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell: Selbstgespräch (1993) is presented there as a work expressing an inner rupture, with the words “Brutale Welt” inscribed on the canvas. This institutional reading recalls the critical and existential dimension running through an oeuvre in which familiar subjects, textual signs and painterly gestures coexist.
