Wolfgang Petrick
[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.
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.
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.
"[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.
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 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”.
"[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.
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.
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".
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.
[...] 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.
