Paul Wunderlich

51 drypoint engravings from the year 1999 which are published here thus hold a surprise in store for the viewer. Namely, they show that in his seventies the artist has persistantly devoted himself for the first time to a technique which he otherwise almost scorned, that he has done so with almost intoxicated devotion and a newly awakened pleasure in the stringent, frugal exercises it imposes on him. Was he excited, after the delicate dusted courses of color and the carefully modulated gradations of color on the plane, on and in which the line appears primarily as contour, to entrust himself with new force to the line and only the line, thereby exposing the veins, bone structure and architecture of the figures and things thereby discovering them anew?

The themes in these sheets are the same which Paul Wunderlich has imagined over more than 50 years and which he has worked out for himself. In the suite there is thus a summing up, not a stock- taking.

Excerpt from Reflections on Paul Wunderlichs Suite of Drypoint Engravings by Jens Christian Jensen