Gone Fishing, Paul Wunderlich

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.