Wolfgang Petrick (12 January 1939 – 5 December 2025) was a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor. From 1975 to 2007, he was Professor of Fine Arts at Berlin University of the Arts, now UdK. In addition, and until 2016, he also worked in his New York City studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Petrick's art reflects the that was revived in the 1960s; he updated it with dystopian pictorial motifs and installation art.
Life and career Petrick was born in Berlin on 12 January 1939. He was already painting and drawing when he attended primary school in Ludwigsfelde near Berlin. During his childhood he built terrariums out of broken flat glass and cages for mice, which his mother sold to pet shops. He experienced the bombing of the anti-Hitler coalition on the Genshagen aircraft engine factory with the forced laborers from the Daimler-Benz Genshagen concentration camp, a subcamp of Sachsenhausen, and he observed his neighbor, who was an SS-man with his German Shepherd and who was driving the concentration camp prisoners in their striped clothing to set up anti-tank barriers. In retrosprct, Petrick said that these early experiences had a formative effect on his entire body of work. In 1951, Petrick moved to West-Berlin with his parents and graduated from the Ulrich-von-Hutten-Gymnasium in Berlin-Lichtenrade. As a teenager, he saw firsthand how badly Berlin had been destroyed during the war; he also experienced the tensions of the Cold War.
From 1958, Petrick studied biology at Berlin's Free University (FU Berlin) but moved to the University of Fine Arts (now UdK) in Berlin-Charlottenburg. As a figuratively oriented painter, he first had to emancipate himself in the early 1960s: “from this official ideology of abstract art, the [human] figure was not popular,” is how he described his turn to the art of the New Figuration. 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 .
In 1972, and in contrast to U.S. photo- and hyperrealism, he showed, again together with Baehr, Diehl, Sorge, and seven other artists, the art of critical realism in the . 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”: anti-utopias of a near future as multi-layered assemblages and mutated, life-size figures, some of which Petrick locked in glass display cases.
Petrick was a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts from 1993. In addition to teaching at the HdK (UdK), he worked on his own works and in 1978 was part of the photographic series Artists in their Studio by Erika Kiffl; her photography is, among other things, presented by the Museum of Art and Industry Hamburg.
From 1994 onwards, Petrick used his time off from academia to work in his Williamsburg studio in New York City. 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, and Dirk Geuer. From this Petrick witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Five years later, he created his work Big Cell: “A fire engine turns the corner against the laws of perspective: it then comes roughly loose. Painting in fine strokes, color in black and white,” is how art critic Simone Reber describes the picture in Tagesspiegel.
Petrick lived and worked in Berlin. He was married to the artist from 1964; the couple had a daughter, the children's and young adult's author Nina Petrick. His wife died in March 2025.
Petrick died in Berlin on 5 December 2025, at the age of 86,"Wolfgang Petrick". poll-berlin.de (in German). Retrieved 7 December 2025. after a long serious illness.
Artistic development Petrick radically turned away from the pop art movement that emerged in the USA and England in the 1950s. Against the background of his personal experiences in a world ravaged by war and still threatened by it, it did not seem to him to be artistically productive. Instead, he experimented with role models like Richard Lindner, but Petrick found the flash and boldness of American advertising art to be too dominant. 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.” In his forms of expression, Petrick is connected to the theories of New Objectivity, Carl Gustav Jung's symbolism, and impulses from Art Brut. To do this, he dealt with one of the most extensive collections of art by mentally ill people, the Prinzhorn Collection. The significance of Petrick's work became apparent in 2011 with his participation in the exhibition “From Kirchner to Today. Artists react to the Prinzhorn Collection”.
Petrick explained further artistic influences, the differentiation as a critical realist from other forms of realism in 2004 during an interview in New York City: “the New Objectivity, which was in a certain way part of Dadaism — or other [artists] like Grosz, Dix and maybe Beckmann." Outside [West] Berlin there were different forms of realism that manifested themselves as a reaction to abstraction: "the Nouveau Réalisme in Paris, the Capitalist realism of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and the Düsseldorf scene, as well as photorealism in California. The critical realists differed from these forms of realism in their skepticism towards cultural excess and the dehumanizing tendency of consumer culture."
For the expression of the faces in his pictures, Petrick initially chose a template “that cannot be surpassed in terms of realism – the ‘’Atlas for Forensic Medicine’’ by the Austrian forensic scientist , published in 1963 by ‘’VEB Verlag Volk und Gesundheit‘’. Here he found photos of the slain, stabbed and shot. The strangely pale faces of the dead with their staringly open eyes survive in his paintings."
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.” 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.
Artistic work, perception 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 then director of the Kunsthalle Kiel answered: “It is all this, and it is how one invokes the power of humanity in the merciless distortion of death. And so Petrick's work may achieve what all art wants to achieve: change.”
Eberhard Roters, founding director of the Berlinische Galerie, discussed Petrick's installations in 1977: “The rotting process is the representational principle that determines the effect of Petrick's work. Rarely before has rotting been artistically portrayed with such force. In the thickets of the cities, Petrick crawled into the undergrowth." The museum curator also pointed out Petrick's special symbolism of social decay: "the injured person, the injured human figure, the injured image of humanity. It's about the injuries that people inflict on themselves through the inventions of their own civilization." As the art critic Heinz Ohff put it: "Wolfgang Petrick's pictures don't scream. [...] 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," or, as Petrick put it: "poetry of the enigmatic stuff that preserve the memory of something that once had meaning for people”.
Jürgen Schilling, art historian and former director of the German Academy Villa Massimo, Rome, looks at the work created up to 2006: “Wolfgang Petrick's work could never be validly classified; all attempts to assign him to current groups failed. His most recent works prove that, guided by aesthetic curiosity, he is constantly working on new concepts in order to further develop his autonomous art." 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. [...] an extraordinary draftsman, painter, sculptor and graphic artist who knows how to stage his ideas and engagement with the present in a powerful visual way. 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.” In Petrick's sculptures, his distorting anamorphoses, New York fire engines from September 11 pick up speed, race in circles of mirrored cylinders, showing their use in apocalyptic carousels. Petrick headlines ‘’Go(o)d Speed’’, when perspectives dissolve and only form in the only desired angle. 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". With Wolfgang Petrick they are revenants with timid corpse-smiles. Equipped with breastplates and pistols, they have long since lost their innocence. Petrick's images are created in layers. He photographs, draws, paints, scans the intermediate result, edits it further, cuts the canvas, patches it, mounts objects into it, until the creativity is swallowed up by the destruction.”