Georg WinterDeutscher Holzschnitt nach ’68

The true German woodcut! Because the museum is not the terrain that Georg Winter favours for his artistic work, and a largely classical exhibition situation, with works on paper on the walls, is not the customary format in which the artist normally makes himself heard. Temporary laboratories, interdisciplinary research projects or Self Organizing Performances are normally the fields of activity through which Georg Winter operates in public space and with which his work is immediately associated. From 2003 to 2007 Georg Winter also held a professorship for art and public space at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg; since then he has been professor of sculpture and public art at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste des Saarlands in Saarbrücken. That impressive woodcuts are produced for almost all of his projects, however, and that these are often part of the installation work as well, tends to be overlooked in view of Georg Winter’s many and varied activities. In fact, though, he has been working continuously in this medium since his beginnings and has thus, over the past decades, created a corpus of several hundred motifs in all, from which this publication presents a cross-section for the first time, just as the Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus in Reutlingen has brought an exemplary selection of them to exhibition. Georg Winter’s works have little in common with familiar woodcut aesthetics and do not rely on the sensuous or haptic qualities of an impasto application of colour, or on high-quality paper as a printing support. Georg Winter always prints his motifs completely homogeneously in black and on transparent paper. As a result some of them look like diagrams on which the various technical devices stand side by side and are explained as they are put to use in a project. This consistently matter-of-fact tone connects with a tradition of relief printing within modernism in the 1920s that is scarcely present today, as it was stylistically promoted, for example, by the Kölner Progressive or by Otto Neurath’s Wiener Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum. And so the book title „Deutscher Holzschnitt nach ’68“ was, of course, also chosen by this internationally networked artist, who commutes between Hungary and Germany, as an ironic demarcation from the woodcut that has recently come back into fashion!

Exhibition:
Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus, Reutlingen, 12/7 – 6/10/2013