German Pop - A critical perspective on the German post-war period

German Pop developed in the 1960s as an independent adaptation of British and American Pop Art, which dealt with consumer culture, mass media and social phenomena. Unlike its Anglo-American counterparts, German Pop was characterized by a stronger focus on the social and cultural realities of the post-war period. Artists such as Sigmar Polke and Lambert Maria Wintersberger in particular combined the aesthetics of the advertising world with a profound social critique that exposed the contradictions of consumer society. As in American-British Pop Art, painting and sculpture became the preferred forms of expression. 

Wintersberger's work from this period shows an unmistakable signature. His series Injury, for example, uses oversized body parts - fingers, thumbs or parts of the mouth - and combines them with sharp, everyday tools such as razor blades or nails. These drastic depictions have an immediate effect on the viewer and illustrate how the beauty of the consumer world can disguise pain and violence. Klaus Honnef aptly described Wintersberger's approach:

Psychological coercion is visualized by physical coercion!

The soft-focus aesthetic of his works contrasts eerily with the injuries depicted and makes the contradictions of the seemingly perfect surface visible. 

 His portraits, which oscillate between abstracted naturalism and gestural expression, show an ambivalence that speaks directly to the viewer. The collage-like compositions of facial features sometimes seem like fragments of a puzzle that does not quite add up. Nevertheless, images of intense presence emerge that always remain recognizably human. 

In his self-portraits, Lambert Maria Wintersberger leaves no distance between himself and his art. He deliberately avoids any idealizing depiction in order to illuminate his own self in an unembellished and unsparing way. However, he is not interested in a demonstration of destruction or deconstruction in the philosophical sense, but in the honest exploration of what remains when the outer shell is broken open. “I can only rely on my limited means, on the fact that something is created with paint that firstly surprises me and secondly is true,” said Wintersberger himself, summarizing the core of his artistic concern.

German Pop was never pure entertainment, but always a reflection of the conditions that characterized life in post-war society. Lambert Maria Wintersberger is one of the artists who were able to masterfully translate the tension between perfection of form and profundity of content into images - and thus confront society with its own abysses. 

In this solo exhibition, we are showing works by Lambert Maria Wintersberger from the 1960s. These early works are characterized by a unique interpretation of Pop Art. In view of Germany's history and the wounds left by the war, both internally and externally, Lambert Maria Wintersberger succeeds in a remarkable way in combining the slick glossy aesthetic with psychological trauma. His works were celebrated by his contemporaries and secured him a position among Germany's best post-war artists.