STETTINO, POLAND.- The National Museum of Stettino (Szczecin) Poland presents an exhibition by Tarshito. The show is presented in collaboration with the Department of Italian Studies, University of Stettino, and will remain open until Thursday, 31 December. The exhibition at the National Museum of Stettino, Poland, follows a series of shows in 2008-2009 in Milan, London, Calcutta and Venice.

Tarshito, based in Italy, has always had an international approach to art. While some of his work has been influenced by his long time in India, the result is totally Tarshito. The constant aspect of his work is his interest in such elements as the sphere, fish, birds, the human hand, and the vase. For Tarshito the vase is a symbol of creation and life which represent man and matter, a perfect symbiosis of will and desire. These are works with a sacred component.

Tarshito means "thirst for inner knowledge" in Sanskrit: it is the name that the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh gave to his Italian student Nicola Strippoli in 1979, then on his first journey to India. Born in Corato, Puglia, southern Italy, in 1952, Strippoli had just graduated from the University of Architecture in Florence, and though still preoccupied with the ideas of radical architecture, was travelling towards the Orient in search of inspiration and full of curiosity. Spiritual India was not something he actively sought but something he stumbled upon - as in all true encounters.

Pune, India, was the beginning of the journey on which he is still embarked, regardless of fashion, regardless of the world’s interest or indifference. His views and experiences as a young man from the West, typically dynamic and focused on future achievements, merged into the experience of meditation: looking into his own inner space, he finds his own way to be creative, his own notion of design.

While Tarshito is an outsider in relation to anything that might be called a trend, he is an insider in that sphere of inspiration and motifs that (as he would put it) comes to the Earth directly from the sky. He uses materials and symbols that belong to ancient traditions and cultures, though his work is committed to the present and aspires to contribute to the future. He is open to any technique, and works with ceramicists and other master craftsmen, for example, to create his giant vases, each one the result of hundreds of individually crafted birds, fish or hands or other elements. The exhibition in Stettino will include his vase One Earth, from 2008, fully 255 cm high - more than eight feet, and 108 cm (3 1/2 ft) in diameter.

This structure in metal and ceramic was made in Tarshito's studio in Rome with the help of Isabella De Chiara, with additional help in Poland from Agnieszka Blazy.

Recent exhibitions
These last 18 months have seen a series of Tarshito exhibitions. "The Sacred Cultures of Art", curated by Andrea B. Del Guercio, opened in mid-2008 at the Church of Saint Francis in Como, Italy, and in December 2008 took over the imposing Castello di Trani near Bari, Puglia, Tarshito's home base. The exhibition then moved on to the Cloisters of San Simpliciano in Milan. In April 2009 Tarshito's first London exhibition, "Jugalbandhi: Encounters in Creation", curated by Daniela Bezzi, opened at The Nehru Centre, the cultural arm of the Indian High Commission. Ms Bezzi also co-curated Tarshito's major exhibition at the Crafts Museum of New Delhi in 2001.

After London two shows were presented in Calcutta (Kolkata), India: “The Vase and the Lines" at the Bose Pacia Gallery and “The Vase and the Warriors of Love", at the Taj Bengal.

“An encompassing creativity”
Introducing Lovescapes, a new book of Tarshito's exhibitions from 2000 through this year, Del Guercio wrote: "Tarshito's works are the outcome of a creativity which encompasses both dissonances and harmonies, that brings together recollections that are literary as well as musical, visual as well as technological - a creativity that can only be fully brought out by a curatorial strategy that makes the most of the exhibition spaces....The artist's own personal account details an art based on the complexities of personal experience, and on the curiosity which puts one's own emotions in contact with those of others by seeking out individual forms."