Wolf Vostell was born in Leverkusen, Germany, and put his artistic ideas into practice from 1950 onwards.

He used the term Dé-coll/age, (in connection with a plane crash) in 1954 to refer to the process of tearing down posters, and for the use of mobile fragments of reality.

For Vostell, Dé-coll/age is a visual force that breaks down outworn values and replaces them with thinking as a function distanced from media.

[1] In 1962 he participated in the FLUXUS Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik event in Wiesbaden together with Nam June Paik, George Maciunas and other artists.

In 1963 Wolf Vostell became a pioneer of Video art and Installation with his work 6-TV-Dé-coll/age shown at the Smolin Gallery in New York, now in the collections of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

This installation was created in 1958 under the title The black room and is now part of the collection of the art museum Berlinische Galerie in Berlin.

Wolf Vostell's automobile-concrete-sculptures made from cars and concrete are to be found in Cologne Ruhender Verkehr (Stationary traffic) from 1969, Concrete Traffic from 1970 in Chicago, VOAEX (Viaje de (H)ormigón por la Alta Extremadura) from 1976 in the Museo Vostell Malpartida in Malpartida de Cáceres, Spain and Zwei Beton-Cadillacs in Form der nackten Maja (Two Concrete Cadillacs in form of the Naked Maja) from 1987 in Berlin.

Vostell also gained recognition for his drawings and objects, such as images of American B-52 bombers, published under the rubric "capitalist realism" and as a result of his inclusion of television sets with his paintings.

Nam June Paik and Vostell were both participants in the Fluxus movement and the work of both artists involved a critique of the fetishization of television and the culture of consumption.

The catalogue raisonné of his screen prints and posters has been published in the Nouvelles de l'estampe by Françoise Woimant and Anne Moeglin-Delcroix in 1982.

From 1950 on, Vostell implemented his first artistic ideas, in 1953 he began an apprenticeship as a lithographer and attended the Werkkunstschule at the Bergische Universität with Ernst Oberhoff in Wuppertal.

In 1955/1956 he attended the Parisian École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts and in 1957 the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

In 1968, in collaboration with the composer Mauricio Kagel and others, he founded Labor e.V., which was to research acoustic and visual events.

This environment from 1958, consisting of three assemblages, entitled Das schwarze Zimmer (German View, Auschwitz Spotlight 568, Treblinka) is part of the collection of the Berlinische Galerie.

With his temple curls, fur hat and caftan, he was a perfect match for the image of the enemy that the propaganda of the Hitler regime had painted as an anti-Semitic stereotype, following the example of the Eastern European Jews.

He exaggerated this image by using other attributes, such as ostentatious rings on his fingers and an equally thick cigar, which in slanderous caricatures from the Nazi era had been symbolically given to the "money-greedy Jewish usurer".

In 1969 - in cooperation with the gallery art intermedia of Helmut Rywelski in Cologne - Vostell created his first car-concrete sculpture Ruhender Verkehr (resting traffic).

Inside the woman's head is a video camera that records images of the sky, which are transmitted to the TV sets.

Graphic works, sculptures and assemblages such as Arc de Triomphe N°1 from 1993, Ritz from 1998 and multiples such as Berliner Brot from 1995.

During a stay in Paris in September 1954, Vostell read the word Décollage in a headline of Le Figaro (German translation: "Untie, loose the glued, separate").

Ceres from 1960, Coca-Cola, your candidate, Great Session with Da (all pictures from 1961), Wochenspiegel Beatles and Livio from 1966 are examples of Wolf Vostell's Dé-coll/agen.

As early as 1958 he thematized the Second World War and the Holocaust in the installation Das schwarze Zimmer (The Black Room).

He made assemblages in which he combined painted bull heads with light bulbs, car parts or other objects.

[6][11] Vostell spoke about de-familiarization provoked by unusual modes of encountering everyday objects: "I show that there are different realities...I take the TV, the same model that the public has at home, and I defamiliarize it, and this is conceivably shocking...

The real disturbance is that their well-known objects, their spoon, their lipstick, their status symbols, their cars are used, and therein lies the content...

With great fervour and strict consistency, Wolf Vostell collected photographs, artistic texts, private correspondence with colleagues such as Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins and many others, as well as press cuttings, invitations to exhibitions and events or books and catalogues which document wolf Vostell's work and that of his contemporaries.

Wolf Vostell's extensive oeuvre is documented in photographic form and makes up part of the archive.

In 1990, Vostell's triptych 9 November 1989 and design drawings for it were exhibited for the first time in the eastern part of Berlin in the gallery at Weidendamm in Friedrichstraße 103.

Since 1989, the 1969 car-concrete sculpture Resting Traffic, for which Vostell cast an Opel Kapitän in concrete, has stood on the central reservation of the Hohenzollernring in Cologne.

Further works are to be found in the Center for Art and Media Technology, the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, the Museo Reina Sofia, the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, the Fondazione Mudima in Milan, on public streets and squares and in other museums and private collections worldwide.