OTHMAR PRENNER – IL GIRO DI VITE

In this one-man exhibition, the Galleria Museo presents many of his new works in a structure that has been conceived expressly for the spaces available in the exhibition areas. Prenner’s leitmotiv is „The Mill“, a subject in which he has been engaged for some time.
The first room of the gallery is mainly occupied by the mill: 2 millstones crush grains of wheat making two white heaps of flour throughout the exhibition. In the other room there is video equipment with two projectors one opposite the other, reflecting each other’s image. Moving in very, very slow-motion and through extremely enlarged shots, the images evoke the main subject, represented through the miller and his work.

Prenner’s work offers the cue to discuss a topic which plays an important role in human subconscious and at the same time is of fundamental importance in relation to our everyday life: the eternal spiral of the passing of time and becoming, expressed by the constant rotary motion of the mill. We usually think that it is possible to see a wood and granite mill only in an antiquity museum. Its archaic aesthetics evokes nostalgic feelings that make us think about the past. This has been determining for popular belief and spirit that recall it in many songs, folk songs, operas, novels and films. The atmosphere of poems whose topic is the mill can be romantic, melancholic, happy, deep, fanciful, bizarre, etc. It has become the model of human nature which, freed from its transience, assumes a mystic character. Today, as in the past, work cycles determine our everyday life. All things considered, the mill was the first machine that simplified the life of many people. At the beginning women did the grinding.

Operating a mill was hard physical work, often linked to slavery, where suffering was symbolised by the eternal spiral of the passing of time and becoming, expressed by the constant rotary motion of the mill. In this association of ideas, the mill also represents the eternal cycle in which continuity is linked to the return of the same past experiences. In a figurative sense, it never stops, but continues its unaltered cycle from existence to existence, turning every day into routine. Every man creates in his soul not only an inner world, but also a future world, new and real, in which he wishes to change his present and realise a better world. Today, we no longer have mills to remind us of a limitless existence focused on becoming and the passing of time, which gives meaning and a right dimension to our everyday life. Everyone must look for meaningful moments on his own. Prenner does not deal with the subject of the mill only from a mystic point of view. The eternal spiral of the passing of time and becoming, expressed by the constant rotary motion of the mill, offers links with the past, present and future. In this way, the artist wants to demonstrate that the mill is a mirror of the consciousness which reflects in our human nature, producing an aesthetic sense.