Exhibition opening

A new art exhibition will be on display at Fischlandhaus Wustrow from October 19. On display will be around 35 works by Wilko Hänsch (*1944) from the past 25 years, some of them large-format. The painter and graphic artist, who lives in Hohen Viecheln near Wismar, is 80 years old this year and continues to be productive as an artist. His work shows a person who goes through life with alert eyes, a critical mind, humor and great sensuality.

Born in Görlitz in 1944, Wilko Hänsch was born into the mental and landscape legacy of the Second World War. The young man moved in artistic circles early on, but studied museology in Leipzig and turned to painting and graphic art as an autodidact. He moved to Mecklenburg with his wife, the painter Anneliese Schöfbeck, in 1974. On the one hand, the decision to move to this remote domicile was linked to the desire to gain artistic freedom by withdrawing from the political tensions in the cultural hotspots of the former GDR. However, the rural surroundings also suited their artistic interests. For a long time, Wilko Hänsch's painterly work was characterized by the couple's shared experiences of nature and travel. In the last 25 years, his work has taken on a different character. Rural isolation increasingly moves him, makes him restless and refers him to the media as a source of relevant images and information. Wilko Hänsch is a political man who is not comfortable with the idyll. He has never been interested in an illusory way out of the conflicts between people and nature and between people themselves that keep society permanently on tenterhooks. In his works, he expresses a resulting attitude to life. Although his art still draws on impressions of nature and landscapes, scraps of writing and images from the flood of information in the media overlay these and break into them, in a flashy, loud and colorful, confusing and disharmonious way. His works always thrive on strong contrasts, whose thematic premises are brought to bear in expressive color combinations and vividly expressive black and white. At the same time, symbolic forms, which give the pictorial narrative something general, become increasingly important.

Wilko Hänsch was nominated for the Mecklenburg Insurance Group's 2023 Art Prize for his current work.

"Wilko Hänsch - printmaking and painting"

Fischlandhaus Wustrow October 19, 2024 - April 27, 2025

Opening on Friday, October 18, 2024, at 6 pm