Petrus Wandrey (8 March 1939 – 5 November 2012) was a German artist who lived and worked in Hamburg. Wandrey studied at Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg (fashion school located at Armgartstraße), from 1960 to 1963, and from 1963 to 1968 at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. He was influenced by Surrealism, Pop Art and the Dada movement.
Wandrey was fascinated by science and technology. These subjects frequently appear in his work, influenced by the simplicity and brilliance of digital image culture. He proclaimed the Digitalist Movement with the delivery of his panel Science and Beyond at Fordham University, New York, in 1978. The work integrates vertical and horizontal pixel sequences, the smallest square-shaped units displayed on the monitor screen. Pixels create a characteristic silhouette with typically jagged outlines that become one of the trademarks of Wandrey's multi-faceted and highly diverse palette of visual imagery. Another distinctive characteristic in many of his works is his use of computer junk or individually manufactured hardware as elements in the creative process.
Early years
Ulrich Carl Peter Wandrey was born in Dresden. He worked in many creative fields including painting, sculpture, installation art, graphics, art objects, furniture design, jewelry design, and textile design. He initially was a designer and illustrator of countless record sleeves for classic, jazz and rock music. He then designed covers for Der Spiegel and Capital magazines, illustrations for Playboy, Stern, TransAtlantik magazines and for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. He also created numerous posters, for instance for the Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies Chinese Roulette (1976) and Despair (1978), and for rock stars. Wandrey then used the proceeds from these commissions to finance his own independent work.
In 1975 he travelled to Port Lligat in Spain where he gave his work Venus' Wind to his idol Salvador Dalí as a birthday present. Dalí then put Wandrey's Venus on permanent show in the Mae West Room at his Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, Spain.compare Galloway, 1999, p. 38f.
1974–1983: The Dawn of Digitalism Wandrey almost accidentally discovers the language of shapes that he had long been seeking. Among other things he is inspired by the visual characteristics of the first computer games produced by the multimedia electronics company Atari, and by the transmission of the Arecibo message in 1975 with its concise binary digital information about life on Earth and its position in the Solar System. Wandrey utilizes the design scope of grids and pixel graphics to analogically create his sculptures and pictures. The fascination of Pop Art, Surrealism, the undefined Dada movement and the language of shapes of the digital age form the basis of his artistic innovation and his analysis of the logic of binary imagery.
In 1978 Wandrey proclaimed his Digitalism in New York with his panel Science and Beyond. Since then he studied and experimented with the extensive possibilities of digital art work. According to Wandrey, the digital language of form does not allow recognizable national or continental features to dominate. Moreover, it is the first symbolic composition method to be globally comprehensible and accepted by people of all nations.
The aesthetic assessment of hardware and its inclusion in art work results in countless experiments. Their intrinsic nature induces Wandrey to investigate the materiality of high-tech tools and the aesthetic attraction of electronic components such as printed circuit boards, laserdiscs, laser diodes, microchips, cable bundles, heat sink units and plotter prints used in chip assembly. The formal principle of his digital art also includes components extracted from computer junk, as in the installation Personal Identity (1994) and the objects Angel of Recycling 1-3 (1992–1996). The computer is literally disemboweled to construct provoking sculptures and assemblies and combine seemingly contradictory elements. Wandrey calls for "an alliance of art and technology" and characterizes his Digitalism of 1978 as "a stylistic tendency in the visual arts that utilizes digital forms of representation and thus constitutes the form language for the epoch of digital technology".Grosz, 1990, title page
In that Wandrey intentionally violates the user's manual, the electronic parts are transposed into a new, sometimes astonishing context. Through the intervention of the artist, they are simultaneously demystified and endowed with fresh mysteries.Galloway, 1999, p. 8
Similar to the artists of the Renaissance, who created paintings, graphics, sculptures, architecture, or even jewelry and commodities, Wandrey covers a broad spectrum with works such as the architectural model Casa Digitale for a skyscraper or Computer Man (1997), where a human figure echoes the shape of a pictogram. In the 1980s he adds a collection of furniture and room textiles integrating elements of computer iconography. The installation Polart Room (1980) is populated with picture elements and furniture objects based on tenfold enlargements of photo cassette elements from the SX-70 folding single lens reflex Land Camera of the Polaroid Corporation.
1984–1993 For the technical realization of his projects Wandrey temporarily cooperates with physicians, technology producing companies, and handicraft enterprises. In 1983 he creates the monumental relief Extraterrestrial Dance (1983) using polispectral colored stainless steel. A new contact with the Norderstedt based printed circuit board manufacturer Heidemarie Heger of Heger GmbH then forms the foundation for many fine arts projects using specially manufactured printed circuit boards as design elements. Professor Dieter Kind, President of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig, helps Wandrey to acquire rejected elements from the «H 1» hydrogen maser atomic clock, which he assembles to form the sculpture Atomic Time Guardian (1988). Through Philips RHW, Wandrey is able to access large-format plotter-prints, diagrams of microchips for processor assemblies, which he uses in many of his art compositions. He also uses dual in-line package (DIP), wafers, electrical cables, etc. in many works mounted on stainless steel sheets or wood. In works such as the Jugglers triptych (1989) and Digitalistic Lesson (1989) he uses this hardware and rigorously robs it of its technological meaning by placing it in a purely artistic context. In Orbiter 1–4 (1990) he uses NASA photographs of Mars and complements their segmented formats with printed circuit boards and laser discs. In 1992 Wandrey discovers the bizarre and exciting shapes of heat sink units at the Fischer Elektronik Company. He then exploits their aesthetic potential as assembly and collage elements for image, sculpture, and object arrangements, such as in the sculptures Interface 1-10 (1992).compare Galloway, 1999, p. 43, 46–47.
Chips and printed circuit boards on the one hand exist as real form, with which Wandrey plays and composes. On the other hand for him they are hieroglyphs of an occult, surreal-mystic world. His art migrates between worlds, that of real form and that of surreal transmission and message.Falckenberg, 2000: "Auf der einen Seite stehen die Chips und Leiterplatten als reale Formen, mit denen Wandrey spielt und komponiert. Andererseits bedeuten sie für ihn Hieroglyphen einer geheimnisvollen, surreal-mystischen Welt. Seine Kunst wandert zwischen den Welten, der realen Welt der Form und der surrealen Welt der Sendung und Botschaft." In 1985 curator Prof. Dr. David Galloway shows the furniture Chip-Case and Chip-Table from the series Casa Digitale by Wandrey at the exhibition Artware in the Congress Center Hamburg, Germany. Later that year Wandrey develops computer graphics with the Quantel Paintbox at VAP (Video-Audio-Print), the computer studio of his friend Richard Kunicki. With the help of the journalist and arts exhibition manager Andreas Grosz the Digitalismus (Digitalism) exhibition of paintings, sculptures and objects by Petrus Wandrey is staged at the State Museum of Braunschweig, accompanied by the catalogue Digitalismus.Grosz, 1990. Grosz had already initiated many projects on the subjects of corporate culture, new media, design, and architecture. The exhibition includes a lecture and discussion series on Culture and Technology – Esthetics in Change with contributions by Professors Ulrich Seiffert, Mihai Nadin, Bernd Rebe, Bazon Brock, and Walther Christoph Zimmerli. Since 1991 Wandrey lived in a relationship with Ute Janssen who was born in 1952 and is a doctor of anaesthesiology. In 2010 they married. In 1992 Wandrey traveled to Antibes, where he meets the jurist and entrepreneur Dr. Harald Falckenberg and inspired him to develop an art collection. Since then many of Wandrey's works were added to the Sammlung Falckenberg.
Since 1994 In 1995 the gallery owner Hans Mayer showed an extensive solo exhibition of Wandrey's works at his commercial gallery in Düsseldorf. It meets with such unexpected success, particularly among young audiences, that it is extended twice. Aesthetics professor Bazon Brock holds the opening speech and writes an article about Wandrey's "digitalist" experiments for Der Spiegel special magazine. His focus is not on computer aided image production. Wandrey does not pretend to create art with software, as unfortunately legions of naïve technology disciples tend to do. If the medium in itself is the message - holy McLuhan -, then the message cannot be 'art' but only the medium again: Graphic-Computer-In-Action. [...] Or, in the case of Wandrey, hardware has to become heartware.Brock, Heartware, S. 146: "Ihm geht es [...] nicht um die Bild-Produktion mit dem Computer. Wandrey gibt nicht vor, mit Software Kunst machen zu wollen, wie das leider eine Heerschar naiver Technik-Gläubiger von sich behauptet. Wenn das Medium allein schon die Botschaft ist – heiliger McLuhan –, dann kann ja die Botschaft nicht "Kunst" sein, sondern bloß wieder das Medium: Graphic-Computer-In-Action. [...] Oder, mit Wandrey: Hardware muss zur Heartware werden."In 1999 the Leipzig Museum of Applied Arts hosts the exhibition Petrus Wandrey Retrospective. The curator is Prof. Dr. David Galloway, who also publishes the exhibition catalogue at Oktagon Publishing House, Köln (Cologne).Galloway, 1999.
Wandrey died in Hamburg.
Symbolism Super icons Aphrodite and Mona Lisa For Wandrey the super icons of fine art are the ancient Aphrodite of Milos and the world-famous Renaissance masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa. Inspired by these "fuel rods of cultural history" he transforms them with the means and potential of his compositional principles. Paintings, reliefs and sculptures are the results. He creates his first Venus metamorphoses in 1973. Wandrey and his artist friend Volker Hildebrandt sway David Galloway to publish the edition Mona 2000.
In Mona Lisa: Homage to Leonardo da Vinci (1975), Petrus Wandrey combines the best-known features of the picture – the face and the crossed hands – to create a new, surrealistic interpretation of the original. Later, in the spirit of the New Media, a Mona Digitalis (1988) is produced from circuit boards and plotter drawings, as well as a Cultware series (1991) on plots for the production of microchips. In the progression of media and materials, the artist fulfills a dictum from Goethe which he enjoys quoting: 'One must reinterpret that which is past, rethink it.' [...] Yet there is nothing in Wandrey's oeuvre comparable to his innumerable paraphrases of the Venus de Milo as the incarnation of female beauty and classical proportions.Galloway, 1999, p. 54f.
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