DYSTOPIA - Wolfgang Petrick & Friends

Petrick’s extensive body of work is shaped by wartime experiences, landscapes of rubble, and his youth in walled-off West Berlin. As a schoolboy in Ludwigsfelde, he witnessed Allied bombings of the Genshagen aircraft engine factory, observed the murderous hunt for concentration camp prisoners right outside his front door, and created his first paintings about the Korean War. The theme of war has never left him and lends his work a renewed political relevance today. Petrick’s culturally pessimistic and dystopian perspective also confronts the audience in the erotically charged cyborg hybrids of his paintings, his “decomposition sculptures,” and human-animal-machine installations, which prophesy a transhuman future spiraling out of control.

As an art student, Wolfgang Petrick was drawn to the works of Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, and Max Beckmann, but also to the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet and the expressive painting of James Ensor. He was a co-founder of Berlin’s first artist-run gallery, Großgörschen 35, became a spokesperson for the Critical Realists, and participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. Petrick was a member of the Academy of Arts and taught master classes at the Berlin University of the Arts (now UdK) for three decades.

The vulnerability and brokenness of humanity and nature within a destructive “civilization” is a recurring theme in Wolfgang Pettrick’s work, extending into his late period, which is presented in detail at Sacrow Palace. This tribute to an internationally renowned figure of the New Figuration movement is complemented by works by his wife Helma (1940–2025) and former students from various generations.

With works by Tatjana Bergius, Boris Eldagsen, Ewa Finn, Samira Freitag, HELMA, Berit Myrebøe, Dennis Rudolph, Heike Ruschmeyer, Jan Sobottka, Iva Vacheva, René Wirths

• Curator: Michael M. Thoss

With the kind support of the SPSG Foundation for Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg and the State of Brandenburg