La Serpara, the garden of Paul Wiedmer

The Contemporary Sculpture Garden La Serpara by Paul Wiedmer, located near Civitella d’Agliano, north of Viterbo, has opened its doors to the public for the inauguration of two new works.

Paul Wiedmer, Swiss sculptor and assistant since the late 1960s to Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, has created in the valley of La Serpara, a microcosm in which art and nature come together in a fascinating balance, in which his iron sculptures and fire create an original path in the garden, alternated with works by about 30 artists from all over the world. La Serpara is a total work of art that combines the artist's botanical passion and environmentally friendly artistic intervention. The garden now has more than forty works that offer different interpretations of the garden, recalling the nearby Sacro Bosco di Bomarzo in a contemporary way, one of the most important suggestions for the Swiss artist who has chosen this remote corner of the center since the 1980s. Italy as a place of life and work.

Karl Manfred Rennertz and Pasquale Altieri, artists invited to create site-specific works for the garden in 2014, suggest new paths, open new passages with their works, highlight signs of the landscape.

Pasquale Altieri creates a peperino portal, a monumental access to the garden which bears the inscriptions Ex tempore and In Aeternum on both fronts. The work, entitled Ex tempore, alludes to the sudden dimension with which the garden reveals itself to the viewer and, like a two-faced Janus, represents the symbolic guardian of a passage that marks a change in space and time within the garden. Altieri in his work often uses texts as ready-mades that he adopts and inserts within a work by re-signifying it. In this case the work is at the same time an architecture that frames one of the possible accesses to the valley and a communication structure that induces the viewer to reflect on the stratification of the different times that are present in the garden.

The German sculptor Karl Manfred Rennertz installs nine sculptures in the driveway leading to the garden that accompany the viewer with the eye, nine ceramic heads that recall the avenues of Renaissance parks and gardens. As always happens in the garden, the artist changes his modus operandi, this time choosing ceramics instead of wood (his favorite material of him) with the intention of celebrating a tribute to the artisan tradition of the area. The highly heterogeneous character of the nine heads testifies to the breadth of the author's expressive baggage who, with the various sculptures, makes an overview of some of the artistic experiences of the twentieth century: from art brut to the Cobra group, from Brancusi to the cult of African masks already present in Cubism.

The two artists, in different ways, insert their works in the garden making allusions to the tradition of Italian and European monumental parks, re-tying the thread that binds the La Serpara garden to the historical tradition of outdoor sculpture parks.

Map: La Serpara, the garden of Paul Wiedmer