After an apprenticeship as a porcelain grinder and a few years as an "Indian painter" at the Meissen manufactory, Jürgen Wenzel, born in 1950, studied painting at the HfBK Dresden and caused a sensation nationwide in the 1980s with his slaughterhouse paintings. in 1988, he was one of only 13 artists from the GDR to take part in the "Zeitvergleich" exhibition in (West) Berlin. Together with Bernd Hahn, Anton Paul Kammerer and Andreas Küchler, he founded and ran the legendary workshop community B53, with which he was able to develop a self-determined, materially independent life and business model for himself and his colleagues even in GDR times.
Since that time, Jürgen Wenzel has been present as an artist in Dresden and people think they know him. But his palette has changed in recent years. The colour, which has always been heavily used, has become more nocturnal, darker; it seems a little as if the memento mori has become a defining attitude to life, which is also reflected in Wenzel's work - not least in his self-portraits, to which a separate room and catalogue were dedicated in our exhibition. We also showed the artist's most recent paintings and selected drawings, including early study sheets from a trip to Moscow and Istra for the first time.
"My problem is to make a painting that can be endured over a longer period of time. My criteria are simple, and I hope that they can be taken from the pictures." JÜRGEN WENZEL
