“In the act of seeing, one should not fixate upon what could be made of what one sees. One should see what actually is.” (Wols)
In 1932, at just nineteen years of age, Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze - whose pseudonym was derived from a 1937 telegram which accidentally shortened his name to 'WOLS' -, left Germany to live in the heart of the contemporary art world in Paris. In close contact with the great artists and poets of 1930s Paris, he launched his career as a self-taught artist using photography as his medium of choice. During the mid-1930s, he created his first drawings and watercolours are created under the influence of Parisian Surrealism. These works already hint at his intensive search for new pictorial worlds and exploration of novel creative processes. Over the course of these formative years, Wols’s pictorial language developed increasingly towards abstraction. He started to paint in oils in 1946 at the suggestion of the art dealer René Drouin, who showed 40 of Wols’ paintings at his gallery in 1947 and introduced him to a wider public.
His extraordinary formal language culminates in the relief-like surface textures of these works. The unique character of these works is based on the superimposed layers of paint and the so-called grattage technique in which Wols's works over the paint surface with his brush or paint tubes. His paintings helped pioneer Art Informel and Tachisme, which dominated European art during and after the 1950s. Wols was born in Berlin in 1913. He died in 1951 of food poisoning and was buried at the famous Parisian cemetery Père Lachaise. He was posthumously represented in the first three documenta exhibitions in 1955, 1959 and 1964 in Kassel and at the Venice Biennale in 1958, with numerous subsequent exhibitions in renowned institutions worldwide. In 2013, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, The Menil Collection, Houston and the Kunsthalle Bremen honored Wols's important œuvre with a major retrospective.
Publications
Works
Exhibitions
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden, Dresden, Germany; travelled to: Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
Menil Collection, Houston, TX, USA
Museum Wiesbaden, Germany
Galerie der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, Germany
Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan
City Gallery of Bratislava / Galéria mesta Bratislavy, Bratislava, Slovakia
Gallery of Fine Arts / Galerija likovnih umjetnosti, Osijek, Croatia
Galerie Berinson, Berlin, Germany
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany
Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany
Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Stella A., Berlin, Germany
Ubu Gallery, New York, NY, USA
Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, Netherlands
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, USA
Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne, Germany
Presentation House Gallery - PHG, North Vancouver, Canada
Städtische Galerie Ravensburg, Ravensburg, Germany
Galerie Karsten Greve AG, St. Moritz, Switzerland
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein
Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Perugia, Italy
Galerie Karsten Greve AG, St. Moritz, Switzerland
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany
Henri Nannen Kunsthalle, Emden, Germany
Maison Particulière Art Center, Brussels, Belgium
Weserburg / Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany
Musée Rath, Geneva, Switzerland
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany
Galleria Blu, Milan, Italy
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany
Kunsthalle Wien (Museumsquartier), Vienna, Austria
Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Hamburg, Gemany
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany
WestLicht. Schauplatz für Fotografie, Vienna, Austria
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany
Galleria Blu, Milan, Italy
Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan
ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany