Paul Wunderlich

In 1955 a scholarship from the Cultural Committee of German Industry allowed Wunderlich to travel, and by the early 1960s he had spent a formative period in Paris working at the Desjobert workshop, where he sharpened his command of lithographic technique. He returned to Hamburg in 1963 to take a professorship in painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, a post he held until 1968, when he resigned to concentrate entirely on his own work. From then on he divided his time between Hamburg and a studio in Saint-Pierre-de-Vassols in Provence, where he remained until his death on 6 June 2010.

Wunderlich is associated with the second generation of Fantastic Realism - a current that drew on Surrealism's interest in the unconscious and dream imagery while maintaining a high degree of technical precision in execution. His paintings and prints typically place the human figure, often female, in settings that are simultaneously classical and disquieting, drawing on mythological sources, the works of Dürer and Ingres, and the collaborations he undertook from the 1960s with photographer Karin Székessy, whom he married in 1971. Their joint portfolios - among them "Modelle" (1969) and "Twilight" (1971) - interweave Székessy's photographs with Wunderlich's lithographic responses in ways that blur authorship and medium. From the late 1960s he also worked increasingly in three dimensions, producing bronze sculptures whose sinuous, erotically charged forms extended the concerns of his work on paper into space.

His work entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, among many others. Awards included the Japan Cultural Forum Award (1964), the Premio Marzotto (1967), a Gold Medal in Florence (1970), and the Kunstpreis des Landes Schleswig-Holstein (1986). Later in his career he designed applied objects, notably the bronze "Minotaurs" chess set (c. 1984), produced in an edition of 1,500 numbered sets.

At Nordic auctions Wunderlich appears regularly in the upper segment of the secondary market for international prints and sculpture. On Auctionist, 37 works have been catalogued across Swedish houses, led by Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm. The top result in the database is the "Minotaurs" bronze chess set, which sold for 47,000 SEK, followed by a "Minotaurus" bronze sculpture at 12,000 SEK. A painting, "Interior 70" (1969-70), achieved 5,080 EUR, and a lithograph portfolio reached 1,179 EUR, reflecting consistent demand across his print, sculpture, and jewellery output.