After 22 years at Hof University of Applied Sciences at the Münchberg location, Prof. Dietmar Spörl, a well-deserved and very popular lecturer, retired at the end of July 2020. As a member of the textile design course and a passionate designer, he played a major role in shaping the successful development of the Münchberg university location
Image: Hof University of Applied Sciences
He has now been given a correspondingly warm farewell by university president Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Lehmann: “The Hof University of Applied Sciences thanks Dietmar Spörl sincerely for his work over many years, for his creativity and his humanity in dealing with colleagues and students. Although his service with us is coming to an end, I cannot imagine with the best will in the world that the next phase of his life will have anything to do with retirement in the true sense of the word – he is still very agile and bursting with ideas. I wish him that he realizes many more of them!”
The goal determines the path!
Prof. Dietmar Spörl
Interest aroused
Dietmar Spörl, who was born in the Upper Palatinate, almost came to Münchberg at a young age. He had successfully applied there for a place to study textile technology and design, but ultimately decided to study design at the Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg: “As a young boy, the stories and illustrations of Wilhelm Busch had awakened my interest in art. I thought to myself: I want to be able to do that later on,” says Prof. Dietmar Spörl.
Teaching at eye level
With his design degree, Spörl began studying painting at the Nuremberg Art Academy. He describes his professor at the time, Ludwig Scharl, as a sympathetic teacher who always treated his students fairly and at eye level. “I always tried to pass that on to my students as well.” Even during his studies, Dietmar Spörl took on numerous additional commissions, from printmaking to stage design (at La Scala in Milan, among other places) to art on buildings
The goal determines the way!
Prof. Dietmar Spörl on his working methodology
He tried out many things, including himself. “The goal determines the way”, he says himself today about his working methodology and the strategy for a successful work of art.
Change to Münchberg
After ten years, he took a teaching position at the University of Bamberg in 1995, but when he learned that the Münchberg professor Klaus Schröter, whom he held in high esteem, was retiring, he successfully applied to succeed him. Since then, he has taught prospective textile designers and, since 2006, also students in the then added subject of media design. Two- and three-dimensional design, perception theory, art history, as well as drawing and graphic illustration have been on the course schedule ever since.
Career as an artist
For the past 20 years, Spörl has lived back in his home in Luhe, Upper Palatinate, where he was born in 1955. To this day, however, his art takes him around the world. His works have been exhibited in countless galleries in major cities and acquired by collectors. In his studio in Windischeschenbach, he lived out the tension that he believes arises from the contrast between teaching and art: “While the designer always has to know what he’s doing something for – after all, it’s about processes and strategies to get to a certain goal – for me, art is like breathing,” says the painter and draftsman.
His works always emerge without a goal or plan. Rather, he paints and draws from the feeling of the moment. Therefore, he never knows in advance what will come out in the end. He will now find much more time for those exciting moments
Dietmar Spörl is an ingenious juggler of words and images.
Prof. Anita Oswald
His colleague Prof. Anita Oswald sums up the thoughts of colleagues and students alike: “Dietmar Spörl is a brilliant juggler of words and images. His work and not least his individual e-mail style is and will remain inimitable! We wish all the best for the new phase of his life!”
