Feature: Mark di Suvero on the Poetry of Sculpture

Mark di Suvero reads “All the Fruit” by Friedrich Hölderlin. Directed by Matthew McKee. Produced by The Red Panel.

The Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana, has launched an eight-part video series featuring Mark di Suvero reading poems that have inspired his sculptures over the years. In the videos, filmed by Matthew McKee of The Red Panel, di Suvero unearths the underlying phrases and philosophies that inform his work.

Timed to National Poetry Month, the videos were released throughout the month of April, each accompanied by a text from Tippet Rise cofounder Peter Halstead. In the first, shared above, di Suvero reads the opening stanza of the 1803 version of “Mnemosyne” (also known as “All the Fruit”) by Friedrich Hölderlin, which he pairs with his 1990 large-scale work titled L’Allumé.

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Mark di Suvero, L’Allumé, 1990, steel, 425 x 425 x 190 in., Bonn, Germany. Photo: Thomas Emden Weinert.

Installed in Bonn, Germany, L'Allumé, or Lit Match, faces out over the Rhine river. The piece stands adjacent to the World Conference Center, an international congressional complex which comprises part of the Bundestag, the German federal parliament. Made of long stainless steel girders painted red, di Suvero’s iconic color of choice, the work appears as a kind of spark or trigger. Like in Hölderlin’s poem, “All the Fruit,” it is “plunged in fire.”

Of this pairing of sculpture and poem, Halstead writes: “It is only the initial impulse of shapes which are illuminated by these frozen flashes of steel, not the final shapes themselves—only the moments of inspiration. I-beams flash out like the momentary flares of a lighter—catalysts, causes, but not results.”

For more videos of Mark di Suvero reading poetry, please click here.

Mark di Suvero, Proverb, 2002. Installation view at Tippet Rise Art Center, Fishtail, MO. Photo: Erik Petersen.

Mark di Suvero, Beethoven's Quartet, 2003. Installation view at Tippet Rise Art Center, Fishtail, MO. Photo: Alban Bassuet.

Founded by Peter and Cathy Halstead in 2016 and set on a 12,000-acre working sheep and cattle ranch against the backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains, Tippet Rise Art Center hosts classical chamber music and recitals and exhibits large-scale, outdoor sculptures. Included on the grounds are two works by Mark di Suvero: Proverb, 2002, and Beethoven's Quartet, 2003.