Paul Wunderlich:
Sculpture "Crescent Moon Stele" (1994), bronze
Paul Wunderlich:
Sculpture "Crescent Moon Stele" (1994), bronze

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limited, 1.250 copies | numbered | signed | bronze | handmade | patinated | partly polished | height 40 cm | on bronze plinth 13 x 7 x 1.5 cm | weight 1.2 kg

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Sculpture "Crescent Moon Stele" (1994), bronze
Paul Wunderlich: Sculpture "Crescent Moon Stele" (1994),...

Detailed description

Sculpture "Crescent Moon Stele" (1994), bronze

The sculpture "Crescent Moon", related to ancient idols, oscillates between the archaic and the modern. Its magic and the imagination it awakens in us take us into the world of mysteries. When Wunderlich gives the slender, elegant female torso a crescent moon as an attribute, he is following - apart from formal considerations - the intentional allusion to Luna, the moon deity. As Joachim Kaiser says about Wunderlich, perhaps one has to be a little obsessed with the will to perfection to bring everything to the (aesthetic) point of truth in order to appreciate how much profundity resonates in the elegant form of this sculpture.

Bronze sculpture 1994, patinated, partially polished. Cast using the Lost-Wax-Process. The height of the sculpture is 40 cm. Mounted on a bronze plinth 13 x 7 x 1.5 cm. Weight 1.2 kg. Edition of 1,250 copies, numbered and signed. Factory number 238.

The artist Paul Wunderlich at work

About Paul Wunderlich

1927-2010

Like no other artist of our time, Paul Wunderlich was one of the most influential style-forming artists of the modern age. Only in 1960, the Hamburg prosecutor seized his works for "indecent". Three years later, the relativley young Paul Wunderlich was hired as a professor at the University of Fine Arts. Numerous awards such as the Edwin Scharff Prize honours at the biennial arts exhibition in Ireland, Taiwan and Bulgaria made Wunderlich internationally famous. He was the only German artist to be admitted to the Paris "Académie des Beaux-Arts". Paul Wunderlich lived and worked both in Hamburg and France until his death in June 2010.

Born in 1927 in Eberswalde near Berlin, the painter and sculptor learned to draw at the Palace School of Art in the Orangery of Eutin Castle. Immediately after World War II, he visited the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts to study graphic arts. After completing his studies, he remained there working as a drawing teacher and in 1963 became a professor.

In the early 1950s, he met Emil Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka. Under their guidance he printed reproductions of their works. He developed a very idiosyncratic style in which manneristic and surrealistic, as well as elements of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, meet. He initially drew his themes inspired by German history, for example the cycle of lithographs "20 July 1944". Later, erotic and sexual motifs became more significant which he treated with delicacy and also a hint of morbidity. In 1960, one such cycle of lithographs was seized by the Hamburg prosecutor for indecent depictions.

In the 1960s he began to work based on photographs by Karin Székessy. After he resigned from his professorship in 1968, he made several study trips to New York and Switzerland. From then on, he also worked on sculpturally aestheticised everyday objects that were parallel with the subtly crafted imagery of his lithographs.

"His works are recognised, appreciated and also bought by a broad public all over the world," writes Paul Wunderlich's biographer Jens Christian Jensen. "Art connoisseurs agree: Paul Wunderlich is the leading master of fantastic realism and one of the very few style-forming artists of our time."

"Out of all the truisms that are spread about his life's work, only one fact is for sure: the realisation that Paul Wunderlich became the unsurpassed master of lithography after Picasso." (Prof. Heinz Spielmann)

"If one searches for the greatest master in the art of lithography in all its possibilities, there is no doubt that Paul Wunderlich deserves all credits." (Carl Vogel)

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