Georg Winter: Deutscher Holzschnitt nach ’68

The true German woodcut!

The museum is not the terrain favoured by Georg Winter for his artistic works, and a largely classical exhibition situation, with works on paper on the walls, is not the usual format in which the artist normally makes his presence felt. Temporary laboratories, interdisciplinary research projects or self-organising performances are normally the fields of activity with which Georg Winter works in public space and with which his work is directly associated. Georg Winter also held a professorship for Art and Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 2003 to 2007, since when he has been Professor of Sculpture and Public Art at the Saarland University of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken. However, the fact that impressive woodcuts are created for almost all of his projects and that these are often also part of the installation work is often overlooked in view of Georg Winter's diverse activities. In fact, he has worked continuously in this medium since his beginnings and has thus created a corpus totalling several hundred motifs over the last few decades, from which this publication shows a cross-section for the first time, just as the Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus in Reutlingen has brought an exemplary selection of them to the exhibition. Georg Winter's works have little in common with familiar woodcut aesthetics and do not rely on the sensual or haptic qualities of an impasto application of colour or on high-quality paper as a printing medium. Georg Winter always prints his motifs completely homogeneously in black and on transparent paper. As a result, they sometimes look like diagrams on which the various technical devices are placed next to each other and explained when they are used in a project. This consistently matter-of-fact tone harks back to a tradition of letterpress printing within modernism in the 1920s that is hardly present today, as was stylistically promoted by the Cologne Progressives or Otto Neurath's Vienna Museum of Society and Economy, for example. And so the title of the book, "German Woodcuts after '68", was naturally chosen by the internationally networked artist, who commutes between Hungary and Germany, as an ironic distinction from the woodcuts that have recently become popular again!

Exhibition:
Municipal Art Museum Spendhaus, Reutlingen, 12/7 - 6/10/2013