After Fountaine Bleu, Paul Wunderlich

For decades, Paul Wunderlich has been one of the most iconic and influential artists you’ve never heard of. Utter his name outside of art circles and chances are you’d get nothing more than a lifted eyebrow and shrug of the shoulders. But one look at his visionary, surrealistic motifs and discomfitted color palettes and off go the flares of visual recognition.
     Long deemed the Father of Fantastic, or Magic, Realism, Wunderlich is sort of like the Gabriel García Márquez of modern art, lending no less than sixty-two years of his life to the study and experimentation of various art media. After perfecting his lithograph technique in Paris between 1960 and 1963, Wunderlich moved on to tackle sculpture, drawing, and painting with airbrush and gouache. Regardless of the tools, Wunderlich brought an innate curiosity and intellect to each creative mode he dallied in, paying no mind to the critical recognition the outcome did or didn’t receive. Nevertheless, Wunderlich has enjoyed long and fruitful acclaim over the course of his career, selling out solo shows across Europe, Asia, and North America. In 1994-95, a retrospective of his work was featured in a scattering of major museums all over Japan.
     But even more telling than the art itself is the vast influence his work has had on pop-culture, high fashion, photography and music.
     Long-time friend and gallery owner, Christian Hohmann sits down with PLANET to reminisce about Wunderlich, the artist and the man, shedding some much-desired light on an unsung hero of surrealism.