Wolfgang Petrick

Wolfgang Petrick (born 12 January 1939, Berlin, Germany) is a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor.

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.

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.

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

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, 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 Otto Prokop, 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."

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 Großgörschen 35

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 Gruppe Aspekt.

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”: anti-utopias of a near future as multi-layered assemblages and mutated, life-size figures, some of which Petrick locks in glass display cases.

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.”

From 1975 to 2007 he was Professor of Fine Arts at Berlin University of the Arts, now UdK.

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.

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.” 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.

Wolfgang Petrick has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts since 1993.

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.

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."

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”.

In addition, and until 2016, he also worked in his New Yorker studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.