Sponti (Activist)

Ottmar Hörl was born in 1950 in Nauheim in Germany.

It achieves notoriety thanks to grandiose large-scale installations with serial sculptures in vast public spaces. He is considered an "attack strategist of a certain type of new generation public art" .

His sculptural works are deliberately produced in infinite multiples, this is because, for Hörl , art must be for everyone and within everyone's reach , promoting the democratization of sculpture like no other artist had ever done until now.

Around the mid-1970s, he began to use his works to explore questions about the dimension of art, as well as epistemological questions regarding the nature of sculpture and the inherent laws of art; trying to evaluate both its meaning and social function, and the role of the artist, on the other.

Hörl places all his research in sculpture , and it is no coincidence that he tries, through his production, to use traditional iconographies and images at the service of a more democratic and innovative approach. All this is reflected both in its use of industrial products (e.g. garden gnomes, heavy pallets, storage boxes, garbage cans, plastic pipes), as well as in collaborations with specialists from different fields such as architects and musicians or ordinary people. ,: one of his installations is famous where he invited all the inhabitants of the city involved to participate.

Ottmar Hörl's intention is to remove “the artistic act” from the center of his production , because this, according to his thought, is the one that has conditioned and in some cases weakened the art world the most. His art is not a subjective and unique expression of his artistic self, but is created by a series of factors, including the artist. This is the reason for so many multiples, for the choice of banal subjects and humble materials. This is the key to fully understanding this artist's conceptual work.

His installations have earned him several awards, the latest of which, the CREO Innovation Award, was awarded by the German Society for Creativity (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kreativität e. V.). Since 1999 he has held the position of professor at the chair of the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, and has been president of the Academy since 2005. In addition, he is a founding member of the Formalhaut group. Ottmar Hörl currently lives and works between Wertheim, Frankfurt am Main and Nuremberg.