Bella and Anton, Paul Wunderlich

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.