About
Petrus Wandrey – Founder of Digitalism
Dresden and Hamburg
Ulrich Carl Peter Wandrey was born in Dresden on 8 March 1939, the son of the physician Carl Heinz Wandrey. His earliest years passed at Rennersdorf Castle in Saxony, in a household whose security ended with the war. In 1944 he fell ill with poliomyelitis, which the family doctor failed to recognise. When his fever reached 40 degrees, his mother ordered the carriage and drove him to the children's clinic in Dresden herself, where his body was held in a cast for a year.
At the end of the war, his grandparents were expropriated by the German communists, imprisoned and deported with other landowners. Both escaped when his grandmother suffered an asthma attack, and her husband was permitted to accompany her to a doctor. She had faced such a moment before from the other side, when her open contempt for the National Socialists brought her before the Gestapo in 1935, and she was spared prison only because she collapsed during the interrogation and the physician of the clinic that had treated her took her into his care.
In 1947 the family was reunited in Hamburg, where the British had engaged his father as attending physician for officers quartered at the Atlantic Hotel on the Alster. They then gave him a further task, the founding of the first Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, which later served as the model for the whole Federal Republic. In 1949, the family moved into a flat in the association's newly built offices, from where the boy had the whole inner city within walking distance.
Petrus Wandrey, 1990; Photo: Wolfgang Neeb, Hamburg
Interview, 2002
The Ruins
Hamburg in 1950 was still a field of rubble, and the boy went through it with his friends. Among the burnt remains he found heaps of paper clips, screws and other metal objects that had survived the fire, and these accidental assemblages held him. At night the group climbed over bent steel girders to see what the flames had left behind. The habit of finding form in industrial debris never left him.
School went badly. He was sent to a boarding school on the North Sea and expelled in 1953 for stealing a bicycle and selling it in a neighbouring town to buy sweets. At the first Gymnasium he set fire to his Latin teacher's newspaper. By night he climbed out of his attic window over the neighbouring roof and let himself back in with a copy of the master key that he had ground himself. In the bars and jazz clubs of the city he met actors and musicians. He loved jazz, played the vibraphone and in 1958 founded a modern jazz combo of his own.
At the Amerika-Haus on the Binnenalster, he combed through the library, discovered the magazine American Heritage and encountered the first drawings of Saul Steinberg, who told an entire story in a single image. When he informed his father that he would leave the Gymnasium, the reaction was fury, followed by the decision to make an architect of him.
Gefängniszelle / Prison Cell (1956)
EASY RIDER-STYLE - MODE DEMO (1987)
Learning the Hand
Instead he worked for antique dealers, restoring paintings, furniture and sculpture. He learned to copy, to reconstruct and to understand historical objects from the inside. He forged two gouache landscapes that hung in his parents' apartment and sold them, and he soon proved skilful at reproducing the folk objects that collectors wanted most. This training in the hand, acquired outside any academy, remained the technical foundation of everything he later made.
From 1960 to 1963 he studied at the Master School for Fashion in Hamburg, today part of the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, with a focus on design. From 1963 to 1968 he continued at the Hochschule für bildende Künste. In 1961 he met Eduardo Paolozzi, then a visiting lecturer, and visited him several times in his studio. Paolozzi, still close to Max Ernst and to Dada, praised the surrealist collage as a new kind of shocking and surprising art.
There were also the years in Brussels, where he travelled to see his girlfriend Yvonne von Moellendorf and where in 1967 he carried out a carefully planned break-in on the Avenue Louise. A fingerprint identified him. He was arrested on entering Belgium in 1968 and held in Saint-Gilles prison, where for a time the authorities suspected him of belonging to an international ring of antique smugglers. He wrote later that he learned a great deal there about the hatred felt towards Germans.
Petrus Wandrey, 1965
Divers Record Sleeves (1965-1975)
Film Poster "DESPAIR" (1978)
The Commercial Years
After his studies he continued to work for antique dealers and was increasingly engaged as a designer of record sleeves. Polydor, Philips, Capitol, Atlantic and WEA were among his clients. In rock and beat he was encouraged to go against the current and to let himself go. He designed the entire set for the WDR television film Brandstifter in 1970.
From 1972 he supplied illustrations for the German edition of Playboy at the request of the art director Rainer Wörtmann, beginning with a portrait of the automobile magnate Ferry Porsche. He designed covers for Der Spiegel and Capital, and posters for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette and Despair, as well as for Fassbinder's staging of Liliom at the Bochum Schauspielhaus with Hanna Schygulla in the title role.
In 1971 he moved into a studio on Klosterallee and met Wolfgang Neeb, recently returned from assisting William Klein in Paris and soon to become one of Germany's most respected art photographers. Neeb documented his work from then on.
The money from these commissions financed the independent work. From 1970 he engaged intensively with the Venus de Milo, a figure that would return throughout his life. The Mona Lisa joined her. He called the two of them the fuel rods of cultural history, images that continue to release energy each time they are touched.
Film Poster "CHINESISCHES ROULETTE " (1977)
Record Sleeve “I Can See for Miles” The Who (1967)
Album Cover “Soul on Top”
James Brown (1971)
Album Cover “School Days”
Alice Cooper (1973)
Album Cover “Fly to the Rainbow” Scorpions (1974)
“I owed my first commission to a friend, the actress Iris Berben, as I did my first LSD trip...We all lifted off to the newest records by The Who, the Rolling Stones, and Velvet Underground, and I had the impression all the musicians were playing in my head, which was open at the top.”
Siegfried E. Loch, founding managing director of WEA Musik in Hamburg, chose the drawing to carry his greetings for 1975. He had it printed as an original graphic in an edition of 200, numbered and signed, and sent it to his friends in the record business.
"Dear Mr Dengler, happy holidays and every good wish for 1975. Much luck, joy and success. Most warmly, yours, Siegfried E. Loch (and WEA)"
Port Lligat, 1975
Among the readymades of 1973 was Venus' Wind, a gilded replica of the classical figure whose broken arms he completed with two Siemens fans. Other variants of the theme were finished with razor blades and with lamps. He tried to sell Venus' Wind and found no buyer. The piece was made with the metal workshop of Michael Schmidt, the first of the fabricators he worked with. Michael Schmidt, Hartmut Hackmann and the firms that followed all received precise construction drawings and assembly instructions from him, a practice he kept for the rest of his life.
Through the Chilean dealer Eduardo Uhart, who lived between Barcelona and Paris and traded in tribal art, he had been hearing about Salvador Dalí for years. Uhart had procured Gaudí furniture for Dalí, which Dalí then painted for his museum. In the spring of 1975, his companion Cornelia Hudler, whom everyone called Gespenst, drew his attention to the master's approaching birthday and proposed that he go and present him with his finest work. She gave him a flight to Barcelona that she had already reserved.
He took Venus' Wind apart and packed it into two parcels.
At Hamburg airport, the police detained him, suspecting that the golden figure had been stolen, and released him after a telephone call to the director of the Academy of Fine Arts. The train from Barcelona was full of bathers and seemed to stop every three kilometres, and the 145 kilometres to Figueres took the whole afternoon. No bus to Cadaqués was in sight, so he took a taxi. At around five on 11 May, Dalí's 71st birthday, it stopped on the beach at Port Lligat beside some fishing boats. He carried the sculpture on his shoulders and the parcel with the fan blades in his left hand over the rocks past a fisherman's cottage to a small stairway, and knocked at a green wooden door. Nobody opened.
MAE WEST ROOM, TEATRE-MUSEU DALÍ
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ATLANTIS,
ARTLINE DESIGN (1986)
GIRAFA (1976)
The stair continued upward past a small square window, and behind the glass, framed in green and held by a white linen curtain, he saw a sun-browned face with two antennae above the upper lip, one to the left and one to the right. A shudder went through him, and he began to sway under his load. He managed to press out two words, regalo presento. Dalí pointed to the green door and opened it once the visitor had given his name.
Venus' Wind entered the Mae West Room of the Teatre-Museu Salvador Dalí in Figueres, where it remains today. You have not given me a great gift, Dalí said, but Surrealism. Then he added the sentence that decided the rest of Wandrey's life.
Surrealism is an invention of my generation. You must create your own, new direction in art for your generation. Wandrey returned to Hamburg, cleared out the studio, and destroyed a large number of his artworks, abandoning his surrealist identity.
The instruction was followed in more than one direction. In 1976 he designed a pack, a box and a lighter for a cigarette brand called Girafa. He sent the drawings to Port Lligat, and Dalí painted his burning giraffe into that field. It is the only object the two of them worked on together, and the division of labour is exact.
Wandrey built the setting and left the middle for the older man. From Dalí he took the licence to invent a language of his own, and with it the idea that an artist may design an object made in thousands. That line runs through the furniture and the porcelain to Atlantis of 1986, a brass savings pyramid for the savings banks in their artline edition of 200, stepped like a raster, with a gold heart in one flank and his emblem under the hinged tip.
VENUS’ LIGHT (1973)
VENUS’ WIND (1973)
Portrait Wernher von Braun (1977) "MARS AND STRIPES"
A Flag for Mars
In the same years, he painted a portrait of Wernher von Braun, the engineer who built rockets at Peenemünde and later carried the United States to the moon. Wandrey crowned him with laurel and with rockets, set him above a green America and placed beside him a flag for Mars, a red planet in the blue field where the stars belong. The Viking landers had touched down on the surface a year earlier, and the first photographs of that ground had just been published.
The earliest Martian flag recorded in the literature was designed in 1984 by Thomas O. Paine, third Administrator of NASA. The tricolour in common use today was made by Pascal Lee in 1999 and carried aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in December of that year.
Wandrey's precedes both by seven and by 22 years. He was not designing an emblem for a colony to come. He was asking who would one day plant it there, and in whose name.
The Break
What followed was a period of searching. There were still playful objects, among them a two-headed camel sofa made in 1975 with the help of the Steiff toy company and a penguin guitar for his friend Carl Alexander Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen. In 1977 came the SawTable and the Hatchet-Table, and a relief called The Leather Scissors for the leather tailor Peter Rohde near the Reeperbahn.
The tables belonged together. Saws carried one top and axes the other, and a few years later two enlarged razor blades would carry a third. Objects made for a living room were built from cutting instruments, and the joke held a second meaning he did not spell out. Around them stood further inventions in the same spirit. Through the eighties came tables carried by spoons, by forks, by a washing machine drum and by three magnum champagne bottles with bronze corks.
DOLLAR HILL RACER (1975)
SAW TABLE (1977)
CHAMPAGNE COOLER (1982)
CHAMPAGNE TABLE (1982)
Peter Rohde, whom everyone called Rhodos, was a trained fashion designer who had opened a leather workshop near the Reeperbahn and dressed the demi-monde and the rock musicians of the city. The relief measured two metres by two. He became Wandrey's assistant and closest friend and worked on every project until 1996.
Meanwhile, in November 1974, the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico had directed a binary message towards the star cluster M13 for three minutes. It will arrive in 24,000 years. The signal carried the essential facts about life on Earth and the position of the planet, written as a grid of dots. Der Spiegel published the image in 1976. Wandrey saw in it the first universal picture language of humanity, a form of writing designed to work without culture, history, or geography.
CAMEL-SOFA (1975) Cooperation with Steiff
CHAMPAGNE COOLER (1982)
CHAMPAGNE TABLE (1982)
CHAMPAGNE COOLER (1982)
COMPUTERMAN (1978)
New York, 1978
Eduardo Uhart introduced him to the New York art dealer Ben Birillo, and through Birillo came an invitation from the Institute for Scientific Humanism at Fordham University to make a picture. He worked there for six weeks and was delighted by the city's lightness and speed.
There he made Science and Beyond. A human figure stands headless, its outline stepped into right angles and drawn in the bands of the spectrum, its body open onto a beach with surf and a low sun. A green leaf replaces the head and bears eyes and a mouth. An atom turns in the chest, a moon hangs to the left and a corona to the right.
The figure is the human sign from the Arecibo message.
Galloway reads the head as a surreal leaf mask after Magritte's Les Grâces Naturelles of 1948 and Le Dernier Cri of 1967, and the picture as still allied to the surrealist tradition. Presenting it at Fordham University, Wandrey proclaimed Digitalism, the stylistic tendency in the visual arts that uses the characteristics of digital representation and is therefore the formal language of the digital epoch. The pixel was the principle and the airbrush the tool.
Arecibo Signal, 1974
SCIENCE AND BEYOND (1978)
NEW AGE (1978)
SCIENCE AND BEYOND (1978)
Petrus Wandrey and his assistant Peter Rohde in his Atelier in Hamburg, 1991.
ROOMS
In 1979, he moved into a live-in studio on Hofweg and sent its antiques to auction. A year later, he opened the film cassette of a Polaroid SX-70, enlarged its components tenfold, and made them into the furniture and pictures of the Polart Room. The metal springs became armchairs. The flash rails and the batteries became mask assemblages.
In 1982 he fitted out the Siggi Due shoe shops in Mannheim, Heidelberg and Baden-Baden with a signet, triangular furniture and fittings of colour-lacquered perforated sheet. The tables stand on women's legs, after the Domina furniture of Allen Jones. He called the ensemble Angel Room.
In the same year he met Anette May-Thies of the Quandt family, whose fortune stands behind BMW. She made her house in Hamburg available to him as a studio and built a comprehensive private collection of his work and commissioned the monumental relief Extraterrestrial Dance of 1983. He wrote that no one had ever come to him with such trust and such extraordinary warmth, and that she took a pure joy in his work that he had never experienced.
CASA DIGITALIS
In 1984, in his studio on Rothenbaumchaussee, he designed a full collection of digital furniture and a complete Casa Digitalis. Carpets, lamps, household objects, and even jewelry followed.
For the silk publisher Art & Dekor, he developed a textile collection with digital patterns. The objects were meant to carry the formal language of Digitalism into daily use, so that the raster appeared on a carpet or in a lamp as readily as on a canvas. He named the Renaissance workshop his model, where one man made paintings, sculpture, architecture, jewellery, and utensils alike, and he wrote that he had always been tempted to explore new materials and techniques.
Casa Digitalis outlasted the furniture as an idea. He described it as his inner world, where his ideas originate. In 1985, the curator David Galloway showed his Megachip-Case and Megachip-Table at an exhibition titled Artware during the Hamburg InterMedia Congress. The digitised furniture stood in the entrance and drew considerable attention, and the show went on to CeBIT in Hannover. Galloway curated his retrospective and wrote his monograph fourteen years later.
CASA DIGITALIS: CHAIRWARE & TABLEWARE; DANCER CARPET (1987)
GIANT CHIP TABLE (1987)
MEGACHIP TABLE (1984)
MEGACHIP CASE (1984)
CHIPMEMBER'S (1988)
HARDWARE
In 1985, he also made contact with the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig, the institution responsible for legal time in the Federal Republic. Its director, Dieter Kind, gave him decommissioned parts of the H1 hydrogen maser, and Atomic Time Guardian followed in 1988. The sculpture stood at the Airbus plant in Finkenwerder in 1992, at the exhibition mounted to present the new aircraft.
In Norderstedt, he began working with the circuit board manufacturer Heidemarie Heger and her daughter Katja, whose material carries the Circuit Family of 1988. Verkerke in the Netherlands, the world's largest poster publisher, printed his digitised Madonna in 1985.
In 1989 the management of chip production at Philips RHW gave him obsolete plots, the large format circuit diagrams used in microchip manufacture, and he became the first artist admitted to that development centre. Andreas Grosz, whom he had met in 1984 and for whose cultural magazine Living he had supplied illustrations, brought about what came next.
In 1990 the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum staged Digitalismus, his first museum exhibition, with a lecture series on culture and technology running beside it, to which German philosopher and art critic Bazon Brock contributed.
ATOMIC TIME GUARDIAN (1988)
OSCILLATION GREEN (1988)
OSCILLATION RED (1988)
OSCILLATION BLUE (1988)
RED DANCER (1987)
DANCERS
Dancing entered the work before the raster did. At fifteen, he was a regular at the jazz club La Barette in the Hamburg Colonnades, learned the vibraphone, and founded a combo. At seventeen he opened a jazz club in the cellar of a bomb site and painted its mural. Yvonne von Moellendorf, his girlfriend, danced at the Hamburg State Opera and later with Maurice Béjart in Brussels. He admired a technique that produced effortless sequences of movement and then broke them off, leaving a single position frozen.
The stroboscope in the beat clubs did the same by other means. Working on the light shows at the Star-Club, Top Ten and Grünspan, he watched the dancers freeze for an instant into sculptures, and the visual event held him more than the music. The Dream-Dancer sheets set such silhouettes into coloured prints taken from an old catalogue of curtains and trimmings, their zigzag contour borrowed from the pixel resolution of a screen. Circuit Dancer of 1986 stands two and a half metres in circuit boards on cut-out stainless and Cor-Ten steel. Brave New Dancer of 1987 belongs to the disco in twelve sheets on handmade paper. The rest of the group keeps to classical ballet, and in the reliefs, the diodes dance.
CIRCUIT DANCER 4 (1986)
PLOTDREAM (1988)
DIGITAL MAN (1988)
CIRCUIT FAMILY (1988)
KING TRON'S PEDAGOEIS (1991)
CYBORGS
In 1990 he obtained NASA photographs of Mars. Orbiter and Cosmic View set wired astronauts into weightlessness against that ground, their bodies covered in circuit boards, a life support cord running from each figure to the picture frame.
In Orbiter, the head is a laser disc. The segmented structure of the NASA originals determined the formats. He held the flight in Orbiter 2 as symbolic of the direction of his entire work.
Circuit Woman, made in 1990 as well, is over three metres in V2A and Cor-Ten steel. Astronaut of 1991 brings the figure down to the floor. It stands more than two metres high in circuit boards, optical discs and stainless steel, and it reads as a heroic suit of armour. The cyborg had been a figure of science fiction. By the time these works were made, the pacemaker and the life support system had turned it into a medical fact, and Wandrey took the prosthesis as a shape to build with.
JUGGLER 1 (1990)
ASTRONOUT (1991)
ORBITER 1 (1990)
HYBRIDS
The animal works began before Digitalism, among the surrealist objects of the seventies. Oh, My Deer of 1986 gives the resting stag a working light-emitting diode for an eye. Wandrey called the stag an imaginary domestic animal, tamed by the hunting trophy in the manor house and by the coloured brushwork above the bar. The same animal returned in 1991 as a plot under the title Brave New World.
In 1992 he walked unannounced into Fischer Elektronik in Lüdenscheid, a maker of heat sinks for the European electronics industry, and was received like an old friend. Ursula, Hans-Albert and Thomas Fischer, impressed by his vision, began collecting his work.
The Hybrid flowers run from Hybrid-Rose of 1994 through Lili, Tulip and Sunflower to Hybrid-Lotus of 2000, built of circuit boards and heat sinks on cut-out stainless steel in editions of 20, and nothing in those materials predicts the result. In Tom and Jerry, the cat defeats the computer mouse. In Brave New Hurdle, the horse jumps a chip. Galloway locates the humour of the work here. Wandrey wanted to show courage for kitsch and to lower the threshold that viewers meet in front of new media art.
HYBRID-ROSE (1994)
HYBRID-TULIP (1996)
HYBRID-LOTUS (2000)
BRAVE NEW WORLD (1991)
TOM AND JERRY (1991)
BLACK ANGEL (1993)
ANGEL
In 1991, he was alone in the front room of his studio when a being of light the size of a person appeared to him. Two eyes looked at him with radiant clarity.
A voice said that it was with him and would not leave him, and its melody reminded him of his mother's.
He recorded that he was fully conscious and not under the influence of alcohol. The first angel work followed soon after.
Balance of Power of 1992 is a wall installation for the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, its body in polished steel, its wings in acrylic glass, its halo the silicon layer of an optical disc. On Air covers Raphael's Sistine Madonna in chips and circuit boards until only the skin of the six figures is left, gives the putti digitised wings and sets a miniature television into the composition. It is held today by the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
In 1993 he installed 25 winged works in Braunschweig Cathedral under the title Engel für Europa, among them two called Angel of Recycling. Jan Hoet, director of documenta 9, came to see them.
He wrote that the longing for angels grows after great political upheaval, and named the ecological catastrophe, the powerlessness of the individual, and the dictatorship of the golden calf.
The cycle stayed with him. In 2000, he installed Angel Age in St Catherine's in Hamburg.
ONLY THROUGH MYSTERY WE LIVE, 1 & 2 (1993)
FEAR NOT - I am the First and the Last Program 3 (1993)
FEAR NOT - I am the First and the Last Program 2 (1993)
FEAR NOT - I am the First and the Last Program 4 (1993)
MASKS
The first mask portrait dates from 1967, made for an artists' festival at the Academy of Fine Arts, an abstracted woman's face in which two mouths take the place of the eyes, drawn from a photograph of Yvonne von Moellendorf. In his final year at the academy, he produced a computer mask for Capital.
The mask line begins there and does not stop. Brock read the later reliefs as masks. The jagged contour of the raster, he wrote, recalls the formal idiom of the Maya and the Aztecs, and Wandrey formed picture reliefs from chips that resemble Maya stone reliefs.
Mr Nerd and Mrs Nerd of 1995 are made wholly of electronic parts. Cyborg's Mask of 1997 assembles chips, circuit boards, cooling elements, and CD-ROMs on V2A steel. His own signet is a mask and a self-portrait at once.
MRS. NERD (1995)
MR. NERD (1995)
VIRTUAL CONTACT 01 (1994)
VIRTUAL CONTACT 02 (1994)
VIRTUAL CONTACT 09 (1994)
DATA CRASH 3 (1996)
TRANSHUMANISM
Personal Identity and Narcissus, both of 1994, bring the networked body into ordinary rooms, before a mirror and at a table, with cables in place of hair. In Personal Identity, the figure sits before a screen on which the variants of his own mask face succeed one another, which answers Vilém Flusser's description of the new city as an agency for renting masks.
Virtual Contact of the same year puts the case in 20 sheets. Ten male and ten female torsos are drawn life-size over pixel fields, each numbered, each fitted with interfaces at the brain, the buttocks, the genitals and the heart. Cables leave the frames and cross the wall, so that any body can be joined to any other. Galloway holds that this work alone would show how far the investigation had gone.
NARCISSUS (1994)
BLACK SIGN-OFF (1996)
SLEIGHT OF HAND (1996)
FIRE! (1998)
BILDERSTURM
In 1995, an overdose of cleaning agent ran down his computer screen and left a pattern of droplets he would have liked to keep with the save key. The accident became the frieze Blue Saver, cut from aluminium by waterjet.
He began to collect the things that damage a picture.
The ink blot proved impossible to make convincingly by hand, so he traced it on graph paper, which gave it the zigzag contour of Digitalism. Crossings out annul the picture. Handprints soil the surface and recall the handprints in cave painting.
In Black Sign-Off an eighteenth century frame is crossed out around a blank canvas, cut by the same jet that would later cut the porcelain. In Cut on Dotted Line of 1996 advertising supplies the instrument, the dotted line that invites the reader to cut a coupon out. The Standard for Imitation works of 2000 are cut by the same tool and polished to a mirror. Fire! joins the charred remains of a documenta 9 stand to a burnt table and chair.
STANDARD FOR IMITATION (2000)
FIRST ARTY SAVER (1996)
HUB-SPLASH! (1996)
SECOND ARTY SAVER (1996)
Recognition
In 1995, Hans Mayer gave him a solo exhibition at the gallery on Grabbeplatz in Düsseldorf. Gabriele Quandt-Langenscheidt, whom he had met in Antibes, had made the introduction. Bazon Brock spoke at the opening. The show drew an unexpectedly young audience and was extended twice. Through Hans Mayer, the work travelled to Art Basel, to the FIAC in Paris and to Art Chicago. At Art Cologne, he met the gallerist Lutz Teutloff, one of the few German dealers who argued consistently for new media art, alongside Volker Hildebrandt and Fabrizio Plessi. Teutloff took on the angel works and showed them in Cologne in 1997.
In 1992, at Anette May-Thies's house in Cap d'Antibes, he met the Hamburg lawyer and businessman Harald Falckenberg, whose humour and curiosity he liked immediately. On his first visit to the studio, Falckenberg bought Atomic Time Guardian as one of the first works of his collection. The New York Times later recorded how the collection had started. It was an artist friend, Petrus Wandrey, who first put it to Falckenberg that collecting "might be a better way to relax than playing golf".
In 1997, he was operated on at the Feldbrunnen Clinic in Hamburg. The anaesthetist Ute Janssen visited him the evening before to explain the risks of the procedure. He fell in love with her at once. They lived together from that year and married in 2010.
The MBB space centre in Munich showed his work in 1986 and the Dresdner Bank on Jungfernstieg in 1998. Industry showed him before the museums did.
In 1999, the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig gave him a retrospective. David Galloway selected the work and wrote the monograph that appeared in the same year with Oktagon in Cologne.
It remains the fullest account of the work, and it ends with the year of its publication.
COMPUTERMAN'S CLOCK (1987)
COOL-COOL (1997)
Hardware
must become
Heartware!
C%L (1997)
Bazon Brock wrote on the digitalist experiments for Spiegel Special in 1995, under the title Heartware. What concerns Wandrey, he argued, is the gestalt appearance of digital processes and their technologies, and not the production of images by computer.
The distinction mattered at the moment the two were most likely to be confused.
Brock then described what had changed in the work. Wandrey no longer painted, drew or printed the forms of digital technology onto canvas and furniture surfaces. He used the hardware itself, laserdiscs, diodes and plotter prints, the original parts of electronics, as real pictorial and object elements. With that, Brock wrote, the knot was cut, and Digitalism became programmatic and indeed materialistic.
The result he called a historical relativisation. The possessive power of a new technology has always been met in the same way. The South Sea islanders took the aeroplane cargo for gifts of the gods and turned the wondrously alien products into cult images, and we turn the products of digital machines into living room decoration, although in truth they threaten to blow apart every living room and every image world inside it, art included. Art can be saved, Brock concluded, only as a fetish of the technology park.
Or in Wandrey's own words: Hardware must become Heartware.
DER SPIEGEL (1972)
JOHANNES 14.6 (1972)
DER SPIEGEL (1986)
DER SPIEGEL (1988)
DER SPIEGEL (1992)
DER SPIEGEL (1993)
DER SPIEGEL
Der Spiegel, Germany's leading news weekly since 1947, commissioned him from the early seventies onward. Jesus in Show Business, 1972. Computer Giant IBM Above All in the World, 1986. America's Deadly Computer Weapons, 1988, published eight days after the USS Vincennes mistook an Iranian airliner for a fighter and killed 290 people. The Chip War, 1992, on Japan overtaking the West in semiconductors. The Shameless Society, 1993, on the trade in sex and violence.
When the magazine needed an image for the semiconductor conflict, for one firm's dominance, for a weapons system that killed the wrong people, and for the commerce of attention, it turned to the artist who had been drawing those subjects since 1978.
VIDIO CRIME (1983)
CULTWARE 1-6 (1991)
“Porcelain had always been modelled.
AMPHORA (2001)
DIGIT 16 (2001)
DIGIT 4 (2001)
DANCER 4 (2001)
DANCER 2 (2001)
KRATER VASE (2001)
DRAGON VASE (2001)
The Pixel could only be cut.“
DATA MASK 1 (2001)
Porcelain
Towards the end of the 1990s, Wandrey met Eduard Sabatier, a dealer in antiques who specialised in porcelain and worked as a partner of the Meissen manufactory. Sabatier had lately bought works of his.
His sons Torsten and Frank knew the manufactory well and arranged the collaboration that followed. Meissen had made the first hard paste porcelain in Europe in 1710 and had modelled it by hand ever since. A pixelated silhouette has right angles and steps, and a modeller's hand does not produce them. Wandrey proposed the waterjet, a tool the manufactory had not turned on porcelain before. It was cut there for the first time. Dancers, amphorae, kraters and vases followed between 2000 and 2004. Several remain unrealised.
In 2000 the Grassi Museum in Leipzig showed the porcelain in Auf den Punkt gebracht, and in 2002 the Galerie im Meissen-Haus in Cologne presented Meissener Porzellan für die digitale Epoche.
DATA MASK 2 (2001)
TECHNO DANCER 2 (2001)
TECHNO DANCER 1 (2001)
TECHNO DANCER 3 (2001)
TECHNO DANCER 4 (2001)
EURO-DANCER (2003)
Last Evolution
The plots carry the next decade. They form the ground of the triptych Jugglers, of Digitalistic Lesson, and of the six Cultware panels of 1991, one in each of six colours, in which the Mona Lisa stands on the plans of a processor. He liked to quote Goethe, that one should reinterpret the past and think it anew. A Mona Digitalis of 1988 had come first, in circuit board and dot matrix print. In 1996, the artist and the company agreed on a joint production, and with the technician Herbes, 15 plot motifs appeared in editions of six.
Love Evolution of the same year cuts hearts out of a red ground and lays a circuit board beneath them. The Call works of 1998 set the telephone beside the human figure. From here the screenprint became a principal medium, since it gives the hard edge and the flat unbroken colour that a pixel is.
By the turn of the century, capital, the brand, the warning symbol, the news, the interface and the apparatus of war all moved in that notation. From then on the pictures stopped containing technology and began to be composed in it. He had described that order two decades before it arrived.
Objects continued beside the pictures, among them Euro-Dancer of 2003, three and a half metres high.
The corporate logo now took the place the borrowed masterpiece had held. A mark is reproduced with the care given to a saint's attribute; one letter is altered, and the sign turns against itself.
LOVE EVOLUTION (1996)
CALL-MADAME (1998)
BRANDINGS 1 (2000)
BLOGGER'S MASK (2002)
BRANDINGS 4 (2000)
Currency
Money had been a subject since the seventies, and Galloway traces it to the plain fact that he often had none. He called the dollar bill the only genuinely international currency. The works of the late nineties stand at the head of the series.
Bank-House of 1997 clads a classical temple front in one-dollar notes and sets the words MONEY FOR ART inside the doorway, where they read correctly only from within. Mona Money of the following year gives the Gioconda the head of George Washington, taken from the portrait by Gilbert Stuart that appears on the one-dollar bill and is therefore, in his words, the most frequently reproduced work of art in human history.
Notenopfer of the same year is a currency gravestone, holding shredded DM banknotes with an original value of 50,000 marks, welcoming the Euro as Germany's and Europe's new currency. Teutloff presented it at Art Forum Berlin in an edition of 1,000. The Berlin collection of Stefan Haupt, assembled under the title Dreißig Silberlinge and devoted entirely to art about money, holds work by Wandrey.
Money Has No Smell of 2006 takes its title from Vespasian's answer to his son's objection to a tax on urinals. Medicinal Plant of 2008 grows blossoms of dollar notes. The weapon obeys the same grammar. Stealth dissolves the bomber into its own radar image and sets the word Culture in the script of a soft drink. The series closes in 2009 with two trees built from circuit boards, each carrying the symbols for yen, euro and dollar where the letters of YES belong. One is named Evergreen and reads ¥€$ W€ CAN; the other, Evergrey, reads ¥€$ W€ PAY, in the year after the banks failed. Capitalism and American culture had supplied the images throughout.
BANKHOUSE (1997)
EVERGREEN - EVERGREY,
STEALTH VERSION 2 (CULTURE) (2006)
¥€$ WE CAN - ¥€$ WE PAY (2009)
Final Years
A political conscience runs through the whole of his work. He held that artists carry an obligation to take part in the intellectual argument against political injustice and religious fanaticism. The piece he regarded as his most important of these is the Heldenporträt of 2004, which shows Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg in uniform with the wings of an angel. Ten years later, the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden showed it in its exhibition on the attempt on Hitler's life, in the seventieth anniversary year and in the city where Wandrey was born.
In 2006, the Ethicon company, Endo-Surgery Deutschland, part of Johnson and Johnson, commissioned Nano-Tech-Med for the entrance hall of its German site at Norderstedt.
A year later came The New Art Times, a newspaper front page drawn in the raster on which 30 years of his figures arrive as the news of the day.
In the same period, his Marilyn entered the touring exhibition Life as a Legend, which travelled to 14 museums in the United States and Canada between 2006 and 2011 and reached the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Between 2007 and 2008, his work was shown in True Romance at the Kunsthalle Wien, the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich and the Kunsthalle Kiel.
NANO TECH (2006)
Heldenportrait Claus Schenk
Graf von Stauffenberg (2004)
QUEEN COOL (2007)
NEW ART TIMES (2007)
KING COOL (2007)
PIXELMOUSE (2009)
Memento
In his last years, his lungs gave out. He moved about with a breathing apparatus, the price, it was assumed, of decades of spray paint and of heavy smoking.
He went on working. Petrus Wandrey died in Hamburg on 5 November 2012.
Shadows and Dust of 2011 sets a skull on a Corinthian capital and gives it two microchips for eyes. The words translate a phrase of Horace, pulvis et umbra sumus, we are dust and shadow. The raster he had built for the coming age was spent at the end on the oldest subject in European art.
In August 2014, the Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin devoted a retrospective to him under the title: Digitalism Art: die geniale Welt des Petrus Wandrey, and in 2018 the Museum Biegas in Warsaw followed.
Work is held by the MAK in Vienna, by the Sammlung Falckenberg at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, and by the collection of Stefan Haupt in Berlin, and the ZKM in Karlsruhe carries him among its artists. Venus' Wind has stood in the Mae West Room since 1975.
SHADOWS & DUST 1 (2011)
SOFTWARE (1988)
Ute Janssen and dog Donald (2002)
He had worked in painting, sculpture, construction, print, furniture, porcelain and cloth, and instead of treating them as separate trades, he saw one undertaking: to give form to DIGITALISM, which he held would in time reach every sphere of our life.
Harald Falckenberg, speaking at the opening of Angel Age in 2000, described the position as precisely as anyone has. The chips and circuit boards are on one side real forms with which Wandrey plays and composes, and on the other hieroglyphs of an occult, surreal and mystical world, so that the art migrates between them, between the world of real form and the world of transmission and message.
Galloway put the same thing another way. By deliberately violating the user's manual, he wrote, Wandrey transposes electronic parts into a new and sometimes astonishing context, where they are demystified and endowed with fresh mysteries at the same time.
He had named his own limit in 2002. Machines will never be able to generate a work of art using software, he said, because an artwork is the result of feelings, and that is something a computer will never accomplish.
He proclaimed Digitalism in New York in 1978 and worked in it until 2012. What holds his entire work together is a single question:
What remains of the human being when the world is written in code running on circuit boards, cables, and microchips, and what is left of the distinction once we have merged with the machines we made?
