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 Großgörschen 35 [de]
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 [de]. 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 (1975)
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 scientistOtto Prokop [de], 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, Rik Reinking [de] 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, (Sammlung Reinking [de], 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 Helma (Malerin) [de] since 1964; The couple has a daughter together: the children's and young adult's author Nina Petrick.
2011 From Kirchner to today. Artists react to the Prinzhorn Collection – Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg
2011 Berlin draws! – Art foyer of the Bavarian Insurance Chamber, Munich
2011 Berlin draws! – Kunsthalle Dominican Church Osnabrück
2010 The Painting of Disaster – Lipanjepuntin Trieste, Italy
2010 Source/Resource – Wilde Gallery, Berlin
2010 Breakthrough! 20 Years After German Unification - First Amendment Center, Nashville, TN - also The Aspen Institute, Aspen, CO - also Pepco's Edison Place Gallery, Washington, DC - also University of Texas San Antonio Art Gallery, San Antonio, TX, USA
2010 Berlin draws! – Deutschherrenhaus, Ludwig Museum Koblenz
2009 20 Years After the Fall of the Wall, Critical Perspectives of Berlin Artists – Washington DC, USA
2009 Impressions of contemporary art in Berlin - Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, Macedonia
2009 awarded/drawn/drawn – Academy of Arts, Berlin
2005 Großgörschen 35 / A piece of West Berlin 1964 to 1968 - Gallery Eva Poll, Berlin
2005 Deep Action, Wolfgang Petrick and master students 1975 to 2005 – Choson University Art Museum, Gwangju, South Korea
2008 Pop and its consequences – Museum Ratingen
2008 Jump in Time – Gallery Brusberg, Berlin
2008 Around 1968 – Gallery Poll, Berlin
2007 25 years of Brusberg Berlin – Gallery Brusberg, Berlin
2007 L'Homme-paysage – Villa Oppenheim, Berlin
2005 40 Plus / Minus Großgörschen 35 – Gallery Poll, Berlin
2005 Paintings and graphics – Sprengel Museum Hanover
2005 Professors of the Faculty of Fine Arts – Berlinische Gallery, Berlin
2005 Deep Action – Wolfgang Petrick and master students 1975 to 2005 – Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin
2005 The Beast and other demons – Sprengel Museum Hanover
2004 Art in Berlin 15 years after the fall of the wall – San Antonio Public Library Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, USA
2004 Viewpoints – Klingspor Museum, Offenbach
2004 Civil Courage – Märkisches Museum Witten
2003 Diffusion / primarily time – UdK in Opel AG, Berlin and Rüsselsheim (among others with Dieter Appelt and Alexander Kluge)
2003 Nine Truths – A-Space, Brooklyn, New York
2003 Catch me if you can – National Art Gallery, Tirana, Albania
2003 Berlin-Moscow / Moscow-Berlin – Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
2003 Contemporary! Art in Berlin – KPM Quartier, Berlin
2002 Body Count – Pepper Projects, Berlin
1999 The 20th century, faces of the time – Kupferstichkabinett Berlin
1999 Red Love – Canvases – Works on Paper – Photographs – Raab Gallery, Berlin
1998 German Marks, Postwar Drawings and Prints – Harvard University Museums (Busch Reininger Museum), Boston, USA
1998 Echo – Gallery Inga Kondeyne, Berlin
1993 Academy 1993 – Academy of Arts, Berlin
1993 Renovation – Friedrichstrasse, Berlin
1991 Venice Biennale, Italy
1989 Art in Berlin 1815 to 1989 – High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
1989 Berlin Art from 1900 to 1989 – Gulbankian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal
1989 25 years of Großgörschen – Gallery Poll, Berlin
1989 Machine People – New Society for Fine Arts in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin
1988 Stations of Modernism – Berlinische Gallery, Berlin
1988 Art after 1945 – New National Gallery, Berlin
1987 Location 1987 – Gallery Pels-Leusden, Berlin
1987 Positions of Realism – Gallery Poll, Berlin
1985 Representation Abroad – Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, USA
1985 Expozitia de Arta Plastica Contemporary din Republica Federala Germania, Romania
1985 Apocalypse (A Principle of Hope) – Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen
1983 Realistic Drawings – Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
1983 Eight artists from the Federal Republic of Germany, Madrid, Spain
1981 Känsle och Härdhet – Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden
1981 Between heavenly and earthly love – Gallery Brusberg, Berlin
1980 Five German Realists – Tuscan Column Hall, Augsburg
1980 Forms of Realism Today – Musée d`art contemporain, Montreal, Canada
1980 Realism and Expressionism in Berlin Art – Los Angeles, USA
1979 New Forms of Realism, Recklinghausen
1979 New Forms of Realism, Warsaw
1979 Painting in Berlin from 1970 to today, Bonn
1978 drawings by realists – Gallery Poll, Berlin - also Amersfoort, Netherlands – also Paris, France
1978 As a good realist I have to invent everything – Kunstverein Hamburg – also Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe
1978 Biennale of Drawing – Sidney, Australia
1978 Ugly Realism – The Roundhouse, London, Great Britain – also Glasgow, Scotland – also The New School for Social Research, New York City
1977/78 big city aspect – Berlin – also Frankfurt – also London – also Edinburgh
1976 21 artists from Germany – Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark
1976 Aspects of Realism, Canada
1976 Berlin now, New York City
1975 Realism and Reality – Kunstverein Darmstadt
1974 Love and Death – Neue Gallery, Aachen
1974 Committed Realists – Nassau Art Association, Wiesbaden
1974 It's a wonderful Life – Gallery Poll, Berlin
1973 With camera, brush and spray gun – Municipal Art Gallery Recklinghausen
1973 Leisure Situations – Gallery Poll, Berlin
1972/74 Principle of Realism – Berlin – also Munich – also Oberhausen – also Freiburg – also Karlsruhe; – also Gothenburg – also Lund – also Tromso (Sweden); – also Bergen – also Oslo (Norway)
1971 Biennale des Jeunes – Paris
1971 Contemporary German Art, Tokyo – also Kyoto, Japan
1970 3rd International of Drawing, Darmstadt
1970 Berlin Realists – Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe
1969 Retrospective Großgörschen 35 – Producer Gallery Berlin
1969 Berlin artist – Municipal Art Gallery Budapest, Hungary
1969 Art Prize of the City of Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg
1967 New Realism - House at Waldsee, Berlin
1967 Hand drawings and watercolors from the last 20 years – Kunstverein Hannover
1967 Artists see themselves – Gallery Schmücking, Braunschweig
1967 Young Berlin Artists – Copenhagen, Denmark
1966 Young Berlin Artists – Kunsthalle Basel
1966 Berlin 66 – Märkisches Museum, Witten
1966 Arte Contemporaneo Allemagne – Museo Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico
1966 German Artists' Association
1965 Young West Art Prize – Kunsthalle Recklinghausen
1963/69 Young city sees young art, Wolfsburg
1963/68 Great Munich Art Exhibition, Munich
1963 Scriptural painting – House at Waldsee, Berlin
Collection of contemporary art of the Federal Republic of Germany
State Museums in Berlin
Awards (selection)
1981 German Critics' Prize
1972 Gold medal at the 3rd Biennale Internationale dellagrafika, Florence, Italy
1971 Cité des Arts scholarship, Paris, France
1969 Painting Prize of the City of Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg
Work documentation (selection)
Literature
The Art of Wolfgang Petrick 1962–2017 in Berlin and Brooklyn, published by The Cohen-Hoedemaeker Collection, 289 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-0-578-56395-4 .
Großgörschen 35. Departure for the Art City of Berlin 1964, edited by Eckhart J. Gillen, Berlin 2014.
Exhibition catalog with texts by Barbara Esch Marowski, Lothar C. Poll, Eckhard J. Gillen. Haus am Kleistpark in cooperation with the Poll Art Foundation, Berlin 2014.
On the road, exhibition catalog, Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection and new works, edited by Hans-Werner Schmidt, 62 pages, 2013, ISBN 978-3-86060-025-2 .
Turbulence, exhibition book, Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche, Osnabrück, published by the city of Osnabrück, 128 pages, 2012, ISBN 978-3-939452-18-8 .
Mutatio, exhibition catalog, Sara Asperger Gallery, 50 pages, Berlin 2008.
Good Slave – Bad Master, exhibition catalog, Gallery Michael Schultz, Berlin 2006.
Deep Action, Wolfgang Petrick and master students, exhibition catalog, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin 2005.
Battery – GlassBuilding – Space – Object – Drawing, exhibition catalog, Academy of Arts, Berlin 2000.
1999 Painting and Material, exhibition catalog, Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin 1999.
Narcissus, exhibition catalog, Raab Gallery, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-926639-30-X .
1962–1989: Leap through the Sun, exhibition catalog, Esslingen ( Villa Merkel ), Hamburg ( Hamburger Kunsthalle ), 1989, ISBN 3-923717-54-7 .
Wolfgang Petrick, Paintings, Drawings 1979–1982 (catalog book compiled by the artist on the occasion of the exhibition of pictures and gouaches), POLLeditions, Volume 2, Berlin 1982.
Wolfgang Petrick, works 1962–1979, drawings, pictures, objects, prints, exhibition catalog, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin 1979.
Peter Sager: New forms of realism - art between illusion and reality. DuMont, Cologne 1977, ISBN 3-7701-0656-3 .
Wolfgang Petrick: Hand drawings, catalog raisonné 1962–1974 created by Werner Nitzsche with the collaboration of Wolfgang Petrick and Lothar C. Poll. Berlin 1974.
