Wolfgang Petrick Explained

Wolfgang Petrick (born 12 January 1939, Berlin, Germany) is a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor. From 1975 to 2007 he was Professor of Fine Arts at Berlin University of the Arts, now UdK. In addition, and until 2016, he also worked in his New Yorker studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Wolfgang Petrick's art reflects the Critical Realism,, that was renewed in the 1960s and updated it with dystopian pictorial motifs and installation art.

Life and career

Wolfgang Petrick was already painting and drawing when he attended primary school in Ludwigsfelde near Berlin. During his childhood he built terrariums out of broken flat glass and cages for mice, which his mother sold to pet shops. He experienced the bombing of the anti-Hitler coalition on the Genshagen aircraft engine factory with the forced laborers from the Daimler-Benz Genshagen concentration camp subcamp,[1] and he observed his neighbor, who was an SS-man with his German Shepherd and who was driving the concentration camp prisoners in their striped clothing to set up anti-tank barriers. Looking back, Petrick says these early experiences had a formative effect on his entire work.[2] In 1951, Petrick moved to West-Berlin with his parents and graduated from the Ulrich-von-Hutten-Gymnasium in Berlin-Lichtenrade. As a teenager, he saw first hand how badly Berlin had been destroyed during the war; he also experienced the tensions of the Cold War.

From 1958 Petrick studied biology at Berlin's Free University (FU Berlin), but moved to the University of Fine Arts (now UdK) in Berlin-Charlottenburg. As a figuratively oriented painter, he first had to emancipate himself in the early 1960s: “from this official ideology of abstract art, the [human] figure was not popular,” is how he describes his turn to the art of the New Figuration.[3] Petrick studied with professors Mac Zimmermann, a representative of German surrealism, and with the Bauhaus artist Fritz Kuhr; he completed his training in 1965 as a master student of Werner Volkert.

Against the established marketing strategies of the art trade, Petrick founded at the end of his studies, together with 15 artists such as Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Karl Horst Hödicke, Markus Lüpertz and Peter Sorge, one of the first independent producers’ galleries in Germany: the

In 1972 and in contrast to US photo- and hyperrealism, he showed, again together with Baehr, Diehl, Sorge and seven other artists the art of critical realism in the . After six years he distanced himself from the group and developed his own visual worlds that are also reminiscent of “the hellish scenes of the classics Bosch, Breughel (compare The Triumph of Death) and Matthias Grunewald with the crucial difference that today it is not about horror and torment, which are caused by external forces and mythical evil forces, but rather about injuries that people inflict on themselves through their own civilization”:[4] anti-utopias of a near future as multi-layered assemblages and mutated, life-size figures, some of which Petrick locks in glass display cases.

Wolfgang Petrick has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts since 1993. In addition to teaching at the HdK (UdK), he worked on his own works and in 1978 was part of the photographic series Artists in their Studio by Erika Kiffl; her photography is, among other things, presented by the Museum of Art and Industry Hamburg.[5]

From 1994 onwards, Petrick used the lecture-free periods to work in his Williamsburg studio in New York City. The Brooklyn address became a contact point for artist friends such as: Jim Dine, James Kalm alias Loren Munk, for some of his Berlin students like Kerstin Roolfs, and for collectors like Arne Glimcher, Robert Cohen, Dirk Geuer. But from there Petrick also witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Five years later he created his work Big Cell: “A fire engine turns the corner against the laws of perspective: it then comes roughly loose. Painting in fine strokes, color in black and white,” is how art critic Simone Reber describes the picture in the Tagesspiegel.[6]

Artistic development

Wolfgang Petrick radically turned away from the Pop Art movement that emerged in the USA and England in the 1950s. Against the background of his personal experiences in a world ravaged by war and still threatened by it, it did not seem to him to be artistically productive. Instead, he experimented with role models like Richard Lindner, but Petrick found the flash and boldness of American advertising art to be too dominant. Rather, he was influenced by works by Jean Dubuffet, the representative of Art Brut, and the paintings by James Ensor, a “crosser” of expressionism, surrealism, and his symbolism: “A retrospective about him was my awakening experience,” said Petrick, remembering the Belgian ‘’Painter of Masks’’: “In the 1960s there was a real sense of optimism.”[7] In his forms of expression, Wolfgang Petrick is connected to the theories of New Objectivity, Carl Gustav Jung's symbolism and impulses from Art Brut. To do this, he dealt with one of the most extensive collections of art by mentally ill people, the Prinzhorn Collection. The significance of Petrick's work became apparent in 2011 with his participation in the exhibition “From Kirchner to Today. Artists react to the Prinzhorn Collection”.[8]

Petrick explained further artistic influences, the differentiation as a critical realist from other forms of realism in 2004 during an interview in New York City: “the New Objectivity, which was in a certain way part of Dadaism — or other [artists] like Grosz, Dix and maybe Beckmann." Outside [West] Berlin there were different forms of realism that manifested themselves as a reaction to abstraction: "the Nouveau Réalisme in Paris, the Capitalist realism of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and the Düsseldorf scene, as well as photorealism in California. The critical realists differed from these forms of realism in their skepticism towards cultural excess and the dehumanizing tendency of consumer culture."[9]

For the expression of the faces in his pictures, Petrick initially chose a template “that cannot be surpassed in terms of realism – the ‘’Atlas for Forensic Medicine’’ by the Austrian forensic scientist, published in 1963 by ‘’VEB Verlag Volk und Gesundheit‘’. Here he finds photos of the slain, stabbed and shot. The strangely pale faces of the dead with their staringly open eyes survive in his paintings."[6]

In Petrick's Berlin studio at the Schlesisches Tor, portrait drawings of models were added: mostly women like those from glossy magazines, which, according to Tim Gierig in 1988, were described as "with his equipment of deformed people” dive into apocalyptic worlds: “The weapon and the prosthesis are rigid. Frogmen and vacuum cleaner Amazons enter the stage.”[10] The collision of the organic and the mechanical provokes an eye-catcher, but the robot people rather serve as drastic guideposts through the hell-like circles but on this side of the world.

Artistic work, perception

In 1974, Jens Christian Jensen asked: "Is Petrick's art a cynical rapport, an accusation, an unmasking using the means of the grotesque, a utopian nightmare of a future in which the total machine-like manipulation of the human puts the battered flesh through the meat grinder?" The then director of the Kunsthalle Kiel himself answers this: “It is all this, and it is how one invokes the power of humanity in the merciless distortion of death. And so Petrick's work may achieve what all art wants to achieve: change.”[11]

Eberhard Roters, founding director of the Berlinische Galerie, discussed Petrick's installations in 1977: “The rotting process is the representational principle that determines the effect of Petrick's work. Rarely before has rotting been artistically portrayed with such force. In the thickets of the cities, Petrick crawled into the undergrowth."[12] The museum curator also pointed out Petrick's special symbolism of social decay: "the injured person, the injured human figure, the injured image of humanity. It's about the injuries that people inflict on themselves through the inventions of their own civilization."[13] As the art critic Heinz Ohff put it: "Wolfgang Petrick's pictures don't scream. [...] The images reflect the horror that remains when everything has become quiet again after the scream.”

Alexander Tolnay, director of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein until 2008, points to the complexity of the impact of Petrick's work: “Although his intense images reveal so many things that are disturbing - globalization, asylum, genetic engineering, economic crises, discipline of mind and body", self-optimization, hopes, longings, fears, impacts, decline – you can only follow them fully if you understand that there is a peculiar charm in everything that is inedible and uncomfortable,"[14] or, as Petrick himself puts it: "poetry of the enigmatic stuff that preserve the memory of something that once had meaning for people”.

Jürgen Schilling, art historian and former director of the German Academy Villa Massimo, Rome, looks at the work created up to 2006: “Wolfgang Petrick's work could never be validly classified; all attempts to assign him to current groups failed. His most recent works prove that, guided by aesthetic curiosity, he is constantly working on new concepts in order to further develop his autonomous art."[15] About Petrick's exhibition at the Sara Asperger Gallery in 2009, which also presented works from his analysis of ‘’9/11‘’ Jens Pepper wrote in the Tagesspiegel under the title “Goddess of the Firefighters”: “They are apocalyptic-seeming visions of a society in upheaval or decay. Snapshots from New York, edited on the computer and printed out, served as the basis for classically drawn spatial structures, graffiti elements and figures that overlay and condense the original motifs. [...] an extraordinary draftsman, painter, sculptor and graphic artist who knows how to stage his ideas and engagement with the present in a powerful visual way. To this day, his style has remained completely independent of fashion, which makes him one of the most exciting artists of his generation in Germany.”[16] In Petrick's sculptures, his distorting Anamorphosises, New York fire engines from September 11th pick up speed, race in circles of mirrored cylinders, showing their use in apocalyptic carousels. Petrick headlines ‘’Go(o)d Speed’’, when perspectives dissolve and only form in the only desired angle. In 2017, Simone Reber wrote about the exhibition of the same name at Max Liebermann-House, Berlin, about the image worlds charged with distortions and deformations under the title “Human — Zombie”: “For example Adam and Eve". With Wolfgang Petrick they are revenants with timid corpse-smiles. Equipped with breastplates and pistols, they have long since lost their innocence. Petrick's images are created in layers. He photographs, draws, paints, scans the intermediate result, edits it further, cuts the canvas, patches it, mounts objects into it, until the creativity is swallowed up by the destruction.”[6] The aggression of the people affected by the consequences of the Second World War, the Vietnam War, up to the time marked by the wars in the collapsed Yugoslavia, are preserved in Petrick's montages to this day: hypodermic syringes and hairdresser's caps, diving goggles, armored vests, Colt Single Action Army worn by chimeras, by Amazons, on battlefields and with the heads of the enemies on theirs hips. “Gas masks, boots, rifles and surgical cutlery are objects that appear again and again in his work and have found their way into his sculptures as real objects,” says cultural journalist Matthias Reichelt for ND.[17]

In May 2022, on the occasion of the retrospective of over six decades of work, as an art collector and curator, questioned the relevance of these works in times of pandemic, Russian invasion of Ukraine and the impending shortage of raw materials. He referred to the upheavals that society is once again exposed to. Arne Rautenberg wrote about the extensive exhibition at the Reinbeker Wood Art Institute, (under the title ‘’Skinning and Images of Suffering — An Approach to the Work of Wolfgang Petrick’’: There is “no chichi, no wishy-washy, no heiti-teiti — this is where all disaster is looked directly in the eye. By the gift of drawing, the present is penetrated in an X-ray-like manner – the depths of human triumph and failure become visible: man in his sketchiness, even fleetingness. Don't trust an idyll, never!"[18] Under the heading ‘’The riddles of the living’’, the former president of the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg Karlheinz Lüdeking, commented on the exhibition comprising over 250 exhibits:[19] "In the chronicles of modern art, Wolfgang Petrick mostly classified under the rubric of “critical realism”. [...] As is well known, the term ‘’realism’’ can also encompass many other things, but today, in view of the images from Ukraine, the so-called neorealismo of Italian post-war films in particular deserves renewed attention. In Roberto Rossellini's film ‘’Germany, Year Zero’’, a boy around the age of twelve wanders through the ruins of Berlin until he finally jumps to his death from the fourth floor of a bombed-out apartment building. [...] Against the background of the war experience, Petrick's work appears in a new light. You suddenly see a constant confrontation with the contrast between the living and the dead, [...] how human, animal and plant bodies unite and fight each other in all sorts of hybrid connections on the surface, with injuries and wounds constantly occurring, but... also to metamorphoses, mutations and metastases that extend into space. Fictional characters want to escape from the showcases in which they are locked up in order to penetrate the world in which we ourselves have established ourselves. The silent relentlessness with which the growths of life assert themselves dominates even at the molecular level, where threads and fibers and tendons and veins connect in webs, in fatty tissue, epidermis, hair.”[20]

Petrick himself wanted to “show the viewer a state of change and deformation” and wanted to create poetic but also “inedible images and installations” that were not easy to consume. “The collector Harald Falckenberg once said that we all still have the war in us,” Petrick quotes him: “My toys were burnt-out bazookas, rusty knives and stuff like that,” he says of his childhood. “I took pictures like that with anger, it also had something liberating,” he says looking back, and since Russia's attack on Ukraine he has been dreaming of war again.[21] Nightmarish fades and combinations play a central role in Petrick's scenarios. “My life has always had such strange superpositions. And that's how I still paint.”[22]

Petrick's work focuses on painting, drawing and printmaking, and he also uses his own photographs for his sculptures. He edits them using copiers, projections or scanners, puts their metamorphoses together into collages or inserts them directly into his objects. He listens to music from the Neue Deutsche Härte and late works by Beethoven: “Our existence is no longer linear,” says Petrick.[6]

Occasionally Petrick's drawings and etchings appear as illustrations in books: for Bora Ćosić in ‘’Alaska! Poems for Lida’’, for Hans Christoph Buch in ‘’Monrovia, mon amour – a journey into the heart of darkness’’. In 1973 and 1974 he worked as a set designer at the ‘’Berlin Forum Theater’’ for the production ‘’Trotsky in Coyoacán’’ and texts by August Stramm.

Wolfgang Petrick lives and works in Berlin. He has been married to the artist since 1964; The couple has a daughter together: the children's and young adult's author Nina Petrick.

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Collections (selection)

Awards (selection)

Work documentation (selection)

Literature

Portrait (Video)

Illustration

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: The end of a small village (Das Ende eines kleinen Dorfes) . Ludwigfeld Historical Society (Ludwigfelder Geschichtsverein) . 2024-01-13 . 2021-04-24. de .
  2. Web site: Jahrgang 1939, Bazookas and nature (Panzerfäuste und Natur) . Berlin childhood (Berliner Kindheiten) . Johannes Zillhardt . 2023-08-06. Johannes Zillhardt . de .
  3. Web site: Wolfgang Petrick turns horror into great art (Bei Wolfgang Petrick wird aus dem Grauen große Kunst) . Abendblatt und Lauenburgische Landeszeitung . 2023-07-22 . Susanne Tamm . 2022-05-05 . de .
  4. Book: Alexander Tolnay . Tubulence – Signs of the epoch: On the drawings by Wolfgang Petrick (Zeichen der Zeitepoche: zu den Zeichnungen von Wolfgang Petrick) . Geuer & Breckner GmbH, Stadt Osnabrück . hard cover . 2024-01-27 . 2012 . de, en . 128 . 9783939452188 .
  5. Web site: Artists in their studios: Wolfgang Petrick, Photography: Erika Kiffl (Künstler in ihrem Atelier: Wolfgang Petrick, Fotografie: Erika Kiffl) . Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg . 2023-07-22 . 1983 . de .
  6. Web site: Human-Zombie (Mensch-Zombie) . Tagesspiegel . 2023-07-23 . Simone Reber . 2017-10-20 . de .
  7. Web site: Wolfgang Petrick turns horror into great art (Bei Wolfgang Petrick wird aus dem Grauen große Kunst) . Abendblatt und Lauenburgische Landeszeitung . 2023-05-21 . 2022-05-05 . de .
  8. Web site: From Kirchner to today. Artists react to the Prinzhorn Collection (Von Kirchner bis heute. Künstler reagieren auf die Sammlung Prinzhorn) . Kunstaspekte . 2023-07-21 . 2011-05-04 . de .
  9. Web site: Wolfgang Petrick and Critical Realism, an outdated idea, Interview (Wolfgang Petrick und Kritischer Realismus, eine überholte Idee, Interview) . Presse Wolfgang Petrick . 2023-08-05 . Wolfgang Petrick . 2004-12-19 . de .
  10. Web site: Speech at the opening of the exhibition (Rede zur Ausstellungseröffnung) . Presse Wolfgang Petrick . 2023-08-06 . Eberhard Roters . de .
  11. Web site: Jens C. Jensen: About Petrick's ‘’Tourists‘’ and other things (Jens C. Jensen: Über Petricks Touristen und anderes) . Presse Wolfgang Petrick . 2023-08-05 . Jens C. Jensen . 1974 . de .
  12. Web site: Eberhard Roters: Rotting as a principle (Eberhard Roters: Verrottung als Prinzip) . Presse Wolfgang Petrick . 2023-08-06 . Eberhard Roters . 1977. de .
  13. Web site: Speech at the exhibition opening (Rede zur Ausstellungseröffnung) . Presse Wolfgang Petrick . 2023-08-06 . Eberhard Roters . de .
  14. Web site: Wolfgang Petrick, Ulrich Reimkasten, Mathias Roloff . Gallery feinart Berlin . 2023-08-05 . 2022-01-26 . de .
  15. Web site: Fire (Feuer) . Presse Wolfgang Petrick . 2023-08-05 . Jürgen Schilling . 2006 . de .
  16. Web site: Goddess of the firefighters (Göttin der Feuerwehrmänner) . Tagesspiegel . 2024-01-28 . Jens Pepper . 2009-01-10 . de .
  17. Web site: Blood is dripping in paradise (Blut tropft im Paradies) . nd, Journalismus von Links . 2023-05-21 . 2022-06-03 . de .
  18. Web site: Retrospective Wolfgang Petrick (Retrospektive Wolfgang Petrick) . Woods Art Institute . 2023-05-21 . 2017-10-20 . de .
  19. Web site: Matterport . Woods Art Institute . 2023-11-19 . 2023 . de .
  20. Web site: The riddles of the living (Die Rätsel des Lebendigen) . Presse Wolfgang Petrick . 2023-11-19 . 2023 . de .
  21. Web site: Wolfgang Petrick turns horror into great art (Bei Wolfgang Petrick wird aus dem Grauen große Kunst) . Abendblatt und Lauenburgische Landeszeitung . 2023-08-05 . 2022-05-06 . de .
  22. Web site: Born in 1939, bazookas and nature (Jahrgang 1939, Panzerfäuste und Natur) . Berliner Kindheiten . 2023-08-05 . Johannes Zillhardt . de .

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