Paul Wunderlich

PAUL WUNDERLICH (Eberswalde, Germany, 1927 – Saint-Pierre-de-Vassols, France, 2010).
“Profil,” 1987.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated.
Measurements: 100 x 70 cm.

The date of this work coincides with the major retrospective dedicated to Paul Wunderlich by the Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum. The exhibition traveled to Kloster Cismar and Schloss Gottorf and was accompanied by the publication *Paul Wunderlich: Painting, Drawing, Sculpture 1951–1987*. “Profil” represents the full maturity of an artist who made the transformation of the human body one of the cornerstones of his artistic language.

Here, Wunderlich constructs a figure halfway between body, mechanism, and apparition, within his unique universe of metamorphosis. The tension between beauty and strangeness, eroticism and fragility, constitutes one of the recurring features of a body of work in which the human figure never remains completely stable. The treatment of the surface is equally significant: in contrast to the almost graphic meticulousness of certain details, Wunderlich preserves large monochromatic areas and a surface crisscrossed by vertical lines that integrate the figure into the background. This dialogue between drawing and painting reflects his extraordinary mastery of graphic techniques and endows the image with a quality that is simultaneously pictorial and linear.

Paul Wunderlich was one of the most renowned figures in postwar German figurative art, with a career that spanned painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, he worked as a printer for Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde, and in 1963 he was appointed professor of printmaking and painting at the same institution. His series *Qui s’explique*, seized in 1960 by German authorities due to its erotic content, was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1986, he received the Schleswig-Holstein State Art Prize and also gained widespread international recognition through exhibitions in Europe, the United States, and Japan.