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
SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2022
THE ART OF TRENDING
THE ART OF TRENDING all over Germany
From prehistoric art to Picasso's Guernica to Banksy’s Flower Thrower, art has always reflected, in its unique way, the moment in which it was conceived.
Pablo Picasso once said that “The art that is not in the present will never be”, and The Art of Trending exhibition captured this perfectly. A contemporary experiment that explored the boundaries of what is art and what is not, by the use of Dall-e 2: the AI system that generates unique images from a description in natural language to create real-time artworks.
The real-time art pieces were exhibited from 19th September 2022. They were also show in our social channels as well as on programmatic billboards around Germany. During that time, remarkable topics occurred such as the death of The Queen Elizabeth II, climate disasters, social protests, sports records, legendary retirements, political conflicts, Anonymous appearance, scientific innovations, paradigm shifts in Disney…
JANUARY 2021 - JANUARY 2022
TERENCE, TIM & TRIER
The exhibition deals in a triad with the central themes of life and death and the question of human identity. The reduction to the three big questions of "being human" has current significance for each of us.
The Canadian-Chinese artist Terence Koh transforms life entirely into art in deliberately exaggerated self-stagings. Following artists such as Beuys, Byars, and Warhol, he constantly reinvents himself and creates his very own self-portrayals within at times contradictory contexts, thus finding his own artistic language.
His ritualistic, sometimes secret performances, which can also be understood in reference to rituals of the great world cultures, oscillate between (re)birth and death and give rise to a feeling of timelessness. The works, sculptures, relics and traces from past performative exhibitions on display at WAI between the years 2003 and 2013 accompany the artist on his search for inner peace with himself and the world, and at the same time challenge the visitor through existential themes such as death, madness and self-wasting. The visitor is confronted with an intense exhibition experience.
Tim stands for life.
The tattoo created by Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye on the back of its human wearer shows, among other things, the symbolism of the world religions and, as a "living art piece", is part of recent art history. Traces and messages bear witness to Tim's 6-month presence at WAI during the past winter. His temporary absence is part of the exhibition.
Lars von Trier's installation, which was also featured in his cinematic work "The House that Jack built" (2018), illuminates death from the perspective of a serial killer and draws a line to Dante's "La divina comedia." It is understood as the gateway to Hell and remains permanently installed under the exhibition house.
This work is not part of the regular guided tours and can only be seen upon separate request.
SEPTEMBER 2019 - DECEMBER 2020
SAMMLUNG REINKING 01
DIMITRIS TZAMOURANIS, GRETA RAUER, PIA STADTBÄUMER
For the first time, the WAI Galleries are opening their doors to the public with an extract from the Reinking Collection. Across 16 exhibition rooms and the large hall, works by modern, contemporary and indigenous artists are presented that take a position on questions surrounding human existence.
EXHIBITED ARTISTS
Eva Aeppli, Fernández Arman, Mary Baumeister, Banksy, Herbert Baglione, Werner Berges, Joseph Beuys, Blu, Olaf Breuning, Baldur Burwitz, Michael Buthe, James Lee Byars, César, Christo, DAIM / Mirko Reisser, Madeleine Dietz, Peter Doig, Brad Downey, Francois Dufrene, Jimmie Durham, Reinhard Drenkhahn, Henrik Eiben, Robert Filliou, Urs Frei, Gregor Gaida, Gelitin, Os Gêmeos, Ludwig Gosewitz, Damien Hirst, General Idea, Mark Jenkins, Allen Jones, Joe Jones, Horst Egon Kalinowski, Izumi Kato, Kaws, Edward & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Imi Knoebel, Wulf Kirschner, Terence Koh, Magda Krawcewicz, Barbara Kruger, Abigail Lane, Seok Lee, Mader, Daniel Man, Mathieu Mercier, Mariko Mori, Nunca, Hermann Nitsch, Cady Noland, OBEY / Shepard Fairey, Manuel Ocampo, C.O. Paeffgen, Wolfgang Petrick, Heinz-Günter Prager, Richard Prince, Jon Pylypchuk, Arne Rautenberg, Rolf Rose, Dieter Roth, Takako Saito, Michael Schmeichel, Werner Schreib, Patrick Sellmann, Roman Signer, Dirk Skreber, Daniel Spoerri, Pia Stadtbäumer, Swoon, Jean Tinguely, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Wolf Vostell, Ben Vautier, Johannes Wohnseifer, Hedi Xandt, Herbert Zangs
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)
SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2022
THE ART OF TRENDING
From prehistoric art to Picasso's Guernica to Banksy’s Flower Thrower, art has always reflected, in its unique way, the moment in which it was conceived.
Pablo Picasso once said that “The art that is not in the present will never be”, and The Art of Trending exhibition captured this perfectly. A contemporary experiment that explored the boundaries of what is art and what is not, by the use of Dall-e 2: the AI system that generates unique images from a description in natural language to create real-time artworks.
The real-time art pieces were exhibited from 19th September 2022. They were also show in our social channels as well as on programmatic billboards around Germany. During that time, remarkable topics occurred such as the death of The Queen Elizabeth II, climate disasters, social protests, sports records, legendary retirements, political conflicts, Anonymous appearance, scientific innovations, paradigm shifts in Disney…
THE ART OF TRENDING all over Germany
JANUARY 2021 - JANUARY 2022
TERENCE, TIM & TRIER
The exhibition deals in a triad with the central themes of life and death and the question of human identity. The reduction to the three big questions of "being human" has current significance for each of us.
The Canadian-Chinese artist Terence Koh transforms life entirely into art in deliberately exaggerated self-stagings. Following artists such as Beuys, Byars, and Warhol, he constantly reinvents himself and creates his very own self-portrayals within at times contradictory contexts, thus finding his own artistic language.
His ritualistic, sometimes secret performances, which can also be understood in reference to rituals of the great world cultures, oscillate between (re)birth and death and give rise to a feeling of timelessness. The works, sculptures, relics and traces from past performative exhibitions on display at WAI between the years 2003 and 2013 accompany the artist on his search for inner peace with himself and the world, and at the same time challenge the visitor through existential themes such as death, madness and self-wasting. The visitor is confronted with an intense exhibition experience.
Tim stands for life.
The tattoo created by Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye on the back of its human wearer shows, among other things, the symbolism of the world religions and, as a "living art piece", is part of recent art history. Traces and messages bear witness to Tim's 6-month presence at WAI during the past winter. His temporary absence is part of the exhibition.
Lars von Trier's installation, which was also featured in his cinematic work "The House that Jack built" (2018), illuminates death from the perspective of a serial killer and draws a line to Dante's "La divina comedia." It is understood as the gateway to Hell and remains permanently installed under the exhibition house.
This work is not part of the regular guided tours and can only be seen upon separate request.
SEPTEMBER 2019 - DECEMBER 2020
SAMMLUNG REINKING 01
DIMITRIS TZAMOURANIS, GRETA RAUER, PIA STADTBÄUMER
For the first time, the WAI Galleries are opening their doors to the public with an extract from the Reinking Collection. Across 16 exhibition rooms and the large hall, works by modern, contemporary and indigenous artists are presented that take a position on questions surrounding human existence.
EXHIBITED ARTISTS
Eva Aeppli, Fernández Arman, Mary Baumeister, Banksy, Herbert Baglione, Werner Berges, Joseph Beuys, Blu, Olaf Breuning, Baldur Burwitz, Michael Buthe, James Lee Byars, César, Christo, DAIM / Mirko Reisser, Madeleine Dietz, Peter Doig, Brad Downey, Francois Dufrene, Jimmie Durham, Reinhard Drenkhahn, Henrik Eiben, Robert Filliou, Urs Frei, Gregor Gaida, Gelitin, Os Gêmeos, Ludwig Gosewitz, Damien Hirst, General Idea, Mark Jenkins, Allen Jones, Joe Jones, Horst Egon Kalinowski, Izumi Kato, Kaws, Edward & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Imi Knoebel, Wulf Kirschner, Terence Koh, Magda Krawcewicz, Barbara Kruger, Abigail Lane, Seok Lee, Mader, Daniel Man, Mathieu Mercier, Mariko Mori, Nunca, Hermann Nitsch, Cady Noland, OBEY / Shepard Fairey, Manuel Ocampo, C.O. Paeffgen, Wolfgang Petrick, Heinz-Günter Prager, Richard Prince, Jon Pylypchuk, Arne Rautenberg, Rolf Rose, Dieter Roth, Takako Saito, Michael Schmeichel, Werner Schreib, Patrick Sellmann, Roman Signer, Dirk Skreber, Daniel Spoerri, Pia Stadtbäumer, Swoon, Jean Tinguely, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Wolf Vostell, Ben Vautier, Johannes Wohnseifer, Hedi Xandt, Herbert Zangs
WAI WOODS ART INSTITUTE
GOLFSTRASSE 5
21465 WENTORF NEAR HAMBURG
