Interview by Jennifer Pappas. Copyright Planet Magazine.
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For decades, Paul Wunderlich has been one of the most iconic and influential artists you’ve never heard of. Utter his name outside of art circles and chances are you’d get nothing more than a lifted eyebrow and shrug of the shoulders. But one look at his visionary, surrealistic motifs and discomfitted color palettes and off go the flares of visual recognition.
Long deemed the Father of Fantastic, or Magic, Realism, Wunderlich is sort of like the Gabriel García Márquez of modern art, lending no less than sixty-two years of his life to the study and experimentation of various art media. After perfecting his lithograph technique in Paris between 1960 and 1963, Wunderlich moved on to tackle sculpture, drawing, and painting with airbrush and gouache. Regardless of the tools, Wunderlich brought an innate curiosity and intellect to each creative mode he dallied in, paying no mind to the critical recognition the outcome did or didn’t receive. Nevertheless, Wunderlich has enjoyed long and fruitful acclaim over the course of his career, selling out solo shows across Europe, Asia, and North America. In 1994-95, a retrospective of his work was featured in a scattering of major museums all over Japan.
But even more telling than the art itself is the vast influence his work has had on pop-culture, high fashion, photography and music.
Long-time friend and gallery owner, Christian Hohmann sits down with PLANET to reminisce about Wunderlich, the artist and the man, shedding some much-desired light on an unsung hero of surrealism.
When did you first come across the work of Paul Wunderlich? What were your initial thoughts and what drew you most to his work?
I encountered Paul Wunderlich’s work very early in my life, when I was 16, which of course was already at the height of his career. At the time my parents were exhibiting a group of artists from Austria at their gallery in a show entitled, Viennese School of Fantastic Realism, an art movement that had its roots in Surrealism. Wunderlich was included as an example of a famous German artist.
What intrigued me in his work was his intellect. Most fantastic realists drew their inspiration from personal experience, fantasies and dreams, so you could only decipher their work by first learning about their personal history. Wunderlich, however, was inspired by history, literature, mythology and art history, so I was able to connect with his work without knowing anything about him. In my eyes, that made him a humble, yet sophisticated, artist because he didn’t put himself in the foreground.
He was also very challenging. When I was running the Hart Gallery in Palm Desert, we received a sculpture by Paul Wunderlich that featured two mythological creatures we couldn’t identify. One of them was an androgynous figure with female breasts and a penis, and no explanation whatsoever. We hunted for days, trying to figure out who that figure was. In the process we learned so much about mythology. The figure turned out to be an interpretation of Neptune’s son Triton, who had the ability to shift shapes.
How has Wunderlich’s style changed over the years?
The first major style change occurred early in his life, in the mid 1960s, and was obviously a transition from the young artist who hadn’t yet found his own personal style to the recognizable stamp that made Wunderlich famous. The second, and in my eyes more important, change occurred in the 1990s.
In 1995 Paul Wunderlich’s close friend, the artist Horst Janssen, passed away from cancer. Even though the media liked to portray the two artists as arch enemies or bitter rivals, in reality the two had been close friends since Janssen studied under Wunderlich in the late 1950s. Janssen’s passing was a shock for Wunderlich. For several years after, Wunderlich worked on a series of dry point etching, a medium he hadn’t touched for decades. It was very obvious that he wanted to honor the great etching master and his friend, Horst Janssen. In the course of creating this series, one could see a change in Wunderlich. The dry point etching didn’t allow for color and the figures were almost two-dimensional, very unlike his work up to this time. All of a sudden he started working with pastel on paper, very rough sketches and two-dimensional figures with little detail. In his sculptural work he discovered the process of cutting thick steel plates with laser or water. This change, when Wunderlich was already 70 years old, was outstanding.
In your opinion, what was Wunderlich’s most prolific period?
Wunderlich has always been a hard worker, and very prolific throughout the decades. He’s created a magnificent body of work, one full of delicate technique and a love for detail that renders each piece very labor intensive.
There was a time between the late 1980s through the late 1990s, however, where he was incredibly prolific. It seems that when he was approaching the “normal” retirement age, he wanted to show the world that this was not the time to retire but to work even harder, to create a legacy. He’s been a visionary his entire life and wouldn’t be stopped by what society considers the time to stop working. Some of the best works that made their way through our gallery were from the early 1990s.
What kind of influence has Wunderlich’s work had on contemporary art, fashion, and design?
The single-most important influence Wunderlich probably had on contemporary art was the cross-over from fine art to design. At the time, no artist in Europe who wanted to be taken seriously would touch anything that resembled design, but Wunderlich believed everything an artist touches is art, regardless of whether the object ended up in a museum or on a dinner table.
Wunderlich designed china for Rosenthal, which was then finished with a design by Versace. He designed objects that were art but could also be used, like the famous chess-set from 1984. He designed furniture, silverware, bottle openers and candlesticks. Unlike other artists who venture into design to make it available to the masses, Wunderlich always considered his objects fine art. It was not his desire to be in every household, on the contrary. But he wanted to show that art has roots in real life and can be reflected in everyday objects. He wanted to create art that people could connect with. He didn’t shy away from objects that were commonly considered craft, like the motif of the Three Monkeys. He made it his own, thus showing that it’s not necessarily the subject that makes the art, but the style, the handwriting of an artist and his view of the world.
How does Wunderlich feel about being deemed “the most important representative of ‘Magic Realism’”?
Wunderlich explicitly dislikes any labels, especially being a representative of “Magic Realism”. For one, because he never considered himself part of a movement and also because “Magic Realism” was widely based on the personal dreams and fantasies of the artists, while he tried to remove his work as much as possible from his personal life.
In my opinion, his work is much stronger without the context of that movement. One aspect of his work that lies outside the stencil of “Magic Realism” is the autonomy of his two-dimensional and three-dimensional work. When looking at artists throughout the last two centuries we find that most have one main creative outlet. Most artists are either painters or sculptors, two-dimensional or three-dimensional thinkers. Many of them attempt to venture out into the other world, but it’s always obvious which one is the dominant form of expression.
One of the most prominent artists of the 20th century was Max Ernst, and his sculpture work was just as important as his painting. With Paul Wunderlich, we have found an important representative of a specific and very small group of artists that have conquered the challenge of creating two equally important bodies of work, and I have a feeling that Wunderlich would like this label much better.
Anything else you’d like to share about your ten-year relationship with the artist?
There were many memorable encounters with Paul Wunderlich and his wonderful wife, [photographer] Karin Szekessy. But the one that stands out the most was a visit my brother and I made out to his estate in the south of France. When we arrived, his wife greeted us and almost immediately took us to the studio, where Wunderlich was working with the famous Swiss lithographer Ernst Hanke on an experiment. They were about to transfer the complete surface of a three-dimensional object, in this case an artichoke, onto a lithography stone. Needless to say, we were speechless. To see Wunderlich at the age of 80, doing cutting-edge experiments in the field of lithography. He was creating a technique that no one had done before him, as he had already done many times in his life. It was an unforgettable moment that showed me the true artist always stays curious and never stands still, ever.
