About
Petrus Wandrey – Founder of Digitalism
Early Years and Formation
Petrus Wandrey, born in 1939 in Dresden, belongs to the small group of European artists whose life and work form an unusually coherent whole. Biography, historical rupture and artistic invention are inseparable in his case. From the outset, his art was less a profession than a lifelong attempt to understand the world and his place within it.
His early childhood unfolded in the fragile idyll of Rennersdorf Castle near Dresden, a world soon shattered by war, expropriation and displacement. Illness, exile and the collapse of family structures during the final years of the Second World War left deep and lasting traces. Drawing, building and inventing imaginary worlds became early forms of self protection. Long before any formal training, Wandrey filled his notebooks with drawings, constructed objects and developed a fascination for human masks, metamorphosis and fragmented identities.
After leaving school, he initially began studies in architecture, a discipline that soon proved too restrictive for his artistic temperament. He then turned decisively toward the visual arts and enrolled from 1960 to 1963 at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg, in the departments of graphic design and applied arts, where he acquired a rigorous training in composition, typography and visual communication.
From 1963 to 1968 he continued his studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, one of the most influential art academies in postwar Germany. There he received a classical academic formation in painting, graphic art and sculpture, while simultaneously absorbing the impulses of Surrealism, Dada and Pop Art that circulated in the international artistic milieu of the time. This combination of applied design and academic fine art laid the technical and intellectual foundations of his later work.
"SOFTWARE" (1988)
Hamburg and the Avant Garde
After completing his studies, he entered the artistic milieu of postwar Hamburg. There he encountered jazz culture, experimental cinema and the international avant garde. Early influences included Lyonel Feininger, Saul Steinberg, Max Ernst and the Surrealists. At the same time, he acquired rare technical skills through restoration work for antique dealers. He learned to copy, reconstruct and technically understand historical objects. This dual formation, artistic imagination combined with artisanal mastery, became a defining feature of his later work.
During the 1960s Wandrey moved fluently between graphic design, film set design, record cover production and fine art. He collaborated with filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and worked for major labels including Polydor, Philips, Atlantic and Capitol. Yet behind this professional success grew a growing dissatisfaction with purely applied art. His interest shifted steadily toward assemblage, iconographic paraphrase and a more radical reflection on modern culture.
Record Cover "The Who" (1968)
Divers Record Covers (1965-1980)
“Already my child’s perspective made me experience the world… torn to shreds, absurd, sad, desperate, and grotesque. Horror was my school; imagination my study.” ⁓ Petrus Wandrey
"HÖRZU" Telephone Card (1993)
Film Poster "DISPAIR" (1978)
SPIEGEL (1986)
SPIEGEL (1988)
SPIEGEL (1972)
SPIEGEL SPECIAL (1995)
JOHANNES 14.6 (1972)
Icons and Cultural Memory
A decisive phase began in the early 1970s with his systematic engagement with the icons of Western art history. The Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and the portrait of George Washington became what he called fuel rods of cultural history. Through collage, assemblage and sculpture, Wandrey subjected classical ideals to the logic of reproduction, media circulation and technological intrusion. History became a laboratory rather than a canon.
DOLLAR HILL RACER (1975)
ROCK TO NASH (1976) Portrait Klaus Doldinger
Portrait Wernher von Braun (1977)
The Birth of Digitalism
By the mid 1970s Petrus Wandrey had reached a moment of profound transition. His long dialogue with Surrealism, Pop Art and iconographic appropriation had brought him to a point where imitation, even of the most radical traditions, no longer seemed sufficient. A decisive encounter took place in 1975, when he travelled to Portlligat to present his work Venus’ Wind to Salvador Dalí.
He placed the sculpture on the "altar" in the world famous Mae West Room of the Teatro Museo Dalí in Figueres and, in a conversation that would remain formative for Wandrey, told him:
“Surrealism is the invention of my generation.
Your task is to find your own artisitc language.”
This sentence marked a symbolic passage. Wandrey understood that the task ahead was not to continue an existing avant garde, but to invent a new one. In the years that followed, his attention shifted increasingly from the historical iconography of Western culture toward the emerging visual order of science and technology.
SIENCE AND BEYOND (1978)
NEW AGE (1978)
Journey to New York
In 1978 he travelled to New York, a city whose rhythm, light and density of information confronted him with the full intensity of a technological civilization in formation. There he conceived and presented Science and Beyond, a work that would soon be regarded as the founding image of his later artistic system. The composition shows a stylised human figure constructed from binary logic and pixelated structures, a being situated between biology and code, matter and information.
At the conceptual core of this work stood Wandrey’s engagement with the Arecibo message, the binary coded cosmogram transmitted into space in 1974 as a message to extraterrestrial intelligence. For Wandrey, this signal was more than a scientific gesture. It represented the first universal image language of humanity, a code designed to transcend culture, history and geography. In Science and Beyond, the logic of the Arecibo cosmogram becomes visual form. The human figure is no longer represented through anatomy, but through data. Identity becomes structure, presence becomes information.
With this work, Wandrey publicly proclaimed the concept of Digitalism. Digitalism did not treat the computer as a tool for image production, but as a cultural condition and a material reality. Circuit boards, plotter prints, laserdiscs, atomic clock components, microchip diagrams and industrial heat sinks became the very substance of painting and sculpture. Technology was no longer depicted. It was embodied.
In this moment, Wandrey stepped decisively beyond Surrealism and Pop Art.
He entered a field in which art no longer reflected the world, but articulated
the grammar of a new civilization.
ATOMIC TIME GUARDIAN (1988)
CHIPMEMBER'S (1988)
Major Cycles and Artistic Maturity
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s his oeuvre unfolded in a series of coherent thematic cycles. In the Cyborg works, wired astronauts and hybrid figures explored the emergence of the technologically augmented human. These are not images of triumph, but of fragile equilibrium, bodies suspended between autonomy and control.
In the Dancers, inspired by ballet, stroboscopic light and jazz culture, movement is translated into pixelated contours and frozen gestures. Here Wandrey returned to the human body, but transformed it through the logic of the digital grid. Grace becomes algorithmic, gesture becomes sequence.
In the Angel works, perhaps his most widely known cycle, religious iconography is combined with electronic materials to address questions of transcendence, ethics and responsibility in a post industrial world. Circuit boards form wings, microchips replace feathers, antique frames enclose hybrid beings that are neither sacred nor ironic.
These angels embody a central tension of Wandrey’s art: the longing for metaphysical orientation in a world increasingly governed by technology. They are guardians of a threshold, figures that stand between faith and code, myth and machine.
DANCER 4 (1986)
GIANT CHIP (1987)
Iconoclasm and the Crisis of the Image
Parallel to these cycles, Wandrey developed the radical group of works known as Iconoclasm. Here he turned against the image itself. Ink blots, crossings out, handprints, scratches and damaged surfaces became motifs of negation. Aluminum reliefs mounted on antique frames, crossed out canvases and burned assemblages reflect on the fragility of representation and the latent violence contained in every act of image making.
In these works, destruction is not an end, but a method of knowledge. The image is tested, violated and suspended in order to reveal the conditions of its existence. Art becomes self critical, archaeology of its own medium.
BLACK ANGEL (1993)
CULTWARE 1-6 (1991)
Collections and International Recognition
Wandrey’s work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in major public and private collections. Important institutional holdings include the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, where key works from the Angel cycle and the Iconoclasm series are preserved, and the Museo Teatro Salvador Dalí in Figueres, where Venus’ Wind has been permanently installed since 1975.
In Hamburg, his work entered the context of one of Germany’s most influential private museum initiatives through the collection of Harald Falckenberg, today housed at the Deichtorhallen. Early acquisitions by Falckenberg marked a decisive moment in the reception of Wandrey’s digitalist works within the field of contemporary media art.
A further important role in the formation of his œuvre’s public presence was played by the collector Anette May-Thies (BMW), who built a large private collection of his work and commissioned several monumental pieces, among them Extraterrestrial Dance. Her long standing intellectual and personal dialogue with the artist accompanied some of the central phases of his artistic development.
SELF (1995) - "A birthday present to myself."
CALL-BOY (1998)
CALL-MADAME (1998)
CALL-GIRL (1998)
Parallel to the museum context, Wandrey realised a number of significant commissioned works for international corporations and institutions. Among these are Nano Tech, conceived for Johnson and Johnson through the mediation of Torsten Sabatier, as well as large scale works for Eventim and other technology related companies. These commissions formed a distinct strand within his practice, in which the language of Digitalism entered the architectural and corporate public sphere.
In the early 2000s, Wandrey collaborated with the Meissen porcelain manufactory on a series of experimental works in which central motifs of Digitalism were translated into porcelain. These works occupy a singular position within his oeuvre, linking the oldest European artistic material tradition with the formal language of digital culture.
In the final phase of his life, Wandrey entrusted the Sabatier family with the long term artistic stewardship of his work. Today, the Sabatier's manage and curate the largest part of the artistic estate that is not held by public foundations, ensuring its scholarly preservation, exhibition history and visibility.
VENUS LIGHT (1973)
NANO TECH (2006)
“Some of my objects evolve from a world or castle which I call Casa Digitalis. It contains all pictures, objects, sculptures, and possible features of digital portrayals, a universe of fantasy that is at once imaginary and feasible.” ⁓ Petrus Wandrey, 2006
AMPHORA (2001) Meissen Porcelain
MEGACHIP-TABLE (1984)
Legacy and Contemporary Relevance
Today Petrus Wandrey is widely regarded as a key pioneer in the artistic interpretation of digital culture. Long before the rise of the internet, artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance, he anticipated the ethical, anthropological and aesthetic consequences of a civilization shaped by data, networks and machines.
Central ideas of contemporary discourse such as transhumanism, post biological identity and hybrid intelligence are already present in his work from the late 1970s and 1980s. His cyborg figures, wired astronauts and networked bodies do not celebrate technological progress. They question it. They ask what remains of human autonomy, memory and responsibility in a world increasingly governed by systems that exceed individual control.
What gives his oeuvre its lasting relevance is not technological fascination, but humanistic insistence. Throughout all phases of his work, the human figure remains central. Even when reduced to data, pixels or circuits, it is never dissolved into abstraction. It remains vulnerable, searching, suspended between hope and loss.
Petrus Wandrey passed away in 2012. He left behind an oeuvre that stands at the threshold between tradition and futurity, between Renaissance humanism and technological speculation, between reverence for history and the necessity of invention.
In an age in which artificial intelligence, neural networks and planetary data systems increasingly define human experience, his work appears less as a document of the past than as a sustained meditation on the future of the human image itself.
Hardware must become Artware!
A PAINTERS DELIGHT (1996)