MAY 2022 - JANUARY 2023
RETROSPECTIVE WOLFGANG PETRICK
„ALL GREAT AND BEAUTIFUL WORK HAS COME OF FIRST GAZING WITHOUT SHRINKING INTO THE DARKNESS” *
The years 1958-2022
Arne Rautenberg's speech at the opening:
Heutungen und Leidbilder
– Eine Annäherung an das Werk von Wolfgang Petrick –
Download PDF 38KB (German only)
How can the pictorial world of Wolfgang Petrick, born in Berlin in 1939 and peppered with distortions, deformations and montages, be structured and classified? And how topical is it in times of pandemic, war and threatening shortage of raw materials?
The exhibition at the WAI Woods Art Institute was the first attempt at a large-scale retrospective of this German post-war artist, who is "extraordinary" in the best sense of the word and who has a pronounced penchant for the US metropolis of New York. On display were paintings, drawings, prints, objects, sculptures, and installations from all of the artist's creative phases.
Rik Reinking's collection unites more than six decades of Wolfgang Petrick's creative period and shows the artist's development from the late 1950s until today. Fascinated by the existential imagery in Petrick's work, the collector traces the artist's underlying motivation. Once again, this exhibition allowed the visitor to learn something about himself as a social being, thrown into the stream of time between unfamiliar isolating constraints and grotesquely repetitive history.
Wolfgang Petrick began his artistic path in the late 1950s in the environment of teachers who were committed to the Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, gestural painting and Art Brut.
Petrick then founded the first producer gallery Großgörschen 35 together with artists such as KH Hödicke and Markus Lüpertz as early as 1964.
In dissociation from the current trends of the time, he developed the group "Aspekt" in the context of Critical Realism with artists such as Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Joachim Schmettau and Peter Sorge, which had set itself the goal of cleaning up the narrow-mindedness and constraints of post-war German society.
In the late seventies he broke with this movement. It was not the last stylistic break in his work. "Breaks" run through his entire creative period and are the most striking consistency in Petrick's work.
He is concerned with "presenting the exhibition visitor with a state of change and deformation," Petrick says. He wants to create poetic, but also "inedible images and installations" that are not easy to consume. Even today, the artist continues to develop his visual worlds into novel concepts with undiminished curiosity and driven by a great creative urge.
His oeuvre as a whole points to the extreme dislocations to which society has been exposed even in recent times, for "the cities, buildings, everyday objects, and mythical figures in Petrick's paintings are exposed to centrifugal, all-tearing forces" (Dr. Harald Falckenberg)
* John Ruskin
MAY 2022 - JANUARY 2023
RETROSPECTIVE WOLFGANG PETRICK
„ALL GREAT AND BEAUTIFUL WORK HAS COME OF FIRST GAZING WITHOUT SHRINKING INTO THE DARKNESS” *
The years 1958-2022
How can the pictorial world of Wolfgang Petrick, born in Berlin in 1939 and peppered with distortions, deformations and montages, be structured and classified? And how topical is it in times of pandemic, war and threatening shortage of raw materials?
The exhibition at the WAI Woods Art Institute was the first attempt at a large-scale retrospective of this German post-war artist, who is "extraordinary" in the best sense of the word and who has a pronounced penchant for the US metropolis of New York. On display were paintings, drawings, prints, objects, sculptures, and installations from all of the artist's creative phases.
Rik Reinking's collection unites more than six decades of Wolfgang Petrick's creative period and shows the artist's development from the late 1950s until today. Fascinated by the existential imagery in Petrick's work, the collector traces the artist's underlying motivation. Once again, this exhibition allowed the visitor to learn something about himself as a social being, thrown into the stream of time between unfamiliar isolating constraints and grotesquely repetitive history.
Wolfgang Petrick began his artistic path in the late 1950s in the environment of teachers who were committed to the Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, gestural painting and Art Brut.
Petrick then founded the first producer gallery Großgörschen 35 together with artists such as KH Hödicke and Markus Lüpertz as early as 1964.
In dissociation from the current trends of the time, he developed the group "Aspekt" in the context of Critical Realism with artists such as Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Joachim Schmettau and Peter Sorge, which had set itself the goal of cleaning up the narrow-mindedness and constraints of post-war German society.
In the late seventies he broke with this movement. It was not the last stylistic break in his work. "Breaks" run through his entire creative period and are the most striking consistency in Petrick's work.
He is concerned with "presenting the exhibition visitor with a state of change and deformation," Petrick says. He wants to create poetic, but also "inedible images and installations" that are not easy to consume. Even today, the artist continues to develop his visual worlds into novel concepts with undiminished curiosity and driven by a great creative urge.
His oeuvre as a whole points to the extreme dislocations to which society has been exposed even in recent times, for "the cities, buildings, everyday objects, and mythical figures in Petrick's paintings are exposed to centrifugal, all-tearing forces" (Dr. Harald Falckenberg)
* John Ruskin
Arne Rautenberg's speech at the opening:
Heutungen und Leidbilder
– Eine Annäherung an das Werk von Wolfgang Petrick –
Download PDF 38KB (German only)
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WAI WOODS ART INSTITUTE
GOLFSTRASSE 5
21465 WENTORF NEAR HAMBURG