Galerie Poll Berlin
Exhibitions
Schaulager: DREAM AND NIGHTMARE
Dystopias by Wolfgang Petrick (1939-2025)
12 June – 1 August 2026, Opening: 11 June, 6–9 p.m.
Welcome address: 7 p.m., followed by a discussion between Jochen L. Stöckmann and Nina Petrick
In DREAM AND NIGHTMARE, HELMA’s “surreal worlds” and the “dystopian visions” of her husband Wolfgang Petrick are juxtaposed at Galerie Poll. Wolfgang Petrick was one of the gallery’s artists from the very beginning, whereas HELMA’s work was first presented by the gallery in 2025 in a solo exhibition in Berlin, and as part of the re:discover programme at Art Karlsruhe.
HELMA’s paintings are deeply connected to surrealism, art brut, and magical realism. They tell of dreams, fairy tales, and visions, evoking a sense of the boundless and the profound. Their beholders encounter snakes coiling around stark branches, or crosses, skulls and flaming wreaths amidst tree roots and ladders stretching skyward. Bounteous blossoms, tangled vines, and thorns, along with hearts, are recurring motifs. Often rendered in vibrant reds and blues, her scenes are executed with obsessive precision in oil. Inner and outer worlds, dream and reality dissolve into paintings of poetic beauty in which menace nevertheless appears to lie in wait.
In several of her works, HELMA uses works on paper by Wolfgang Petrick as source material, incorporating his motifs into her own compositions. These “joint works”, together with a portrait of Helma drawn by Wolfgang Petrick – in which he regards his wife from multiple perspectives while portraying himself as the observer – serve as a link between the two exhibitions shown concurrently.
Wolfgang Petrick’s work during the 1960s and 1970s is closely tied to the concept of critical realism, an artistic movement that became a defining feature of the West Berlin art scene. In the 1980s, Petrick moved away from this stylistic approach, though he remained deeply engaged with artistic predecessors such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and James Ensor.
During the decades that followed, Petrick created – through his paintings, drawings, prints, objects, sculptures, and installations – a distinctive and at times spatially expansive visual cosmos, drawing on mythological, Christian, art-historical, and scientific sources, as well as on news and pornographic magazines.
“Desire and suffering, eros and death, tenderness and aggression exist in close proximity as defining forces within his art, which continually revolves around the fragile equilibrium between humanity, nature, and power, confronting the viewer with the tension between emotion and intellect” (Werner Hofmann).
In his predominantly large-scale compositions, Petrick interweaves multiple pictorial and media layers through stratification and overlay. He works in thematic cycles and on several pieces simultaneously. Combining oil and acrylic painting with drawing, he collages and assembles materials, photographs the artistic process, digitally reworks the image, prints the digital picture onto canvas, and then paints or draws over it again. The development of a single work may extend over several years.
Biographies
Born in 1940 as Helma Hartmann in Berlin, HELMA trained as a technical draftswoman between 1959 and 1961. She married artist Wolfgang Petrick in 1964, and her daughter Nina was born in 1965. HELMA began painting in 1974 and adopted her artist name that same year. Wolfgang Petrick (1939–2025) studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts (Hochschule der Künste Berlin, HdK) with Professor Werner Volkert between 1958 and 1965, while also spending several semesters studying biology at the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin). Together with K. H. Hödicke, Markus Lüpertz, and others, he co-founded Germany’s first self-help gallery, Großgörschen 35 (1964–1968), and later, together with Bettina von Arnim, Peter Sorge, Joachim Schmettau, and others, established the Gruppe Aspekt (1972–1978). In 1975, he was appointed professor at the HdK, where he taught painting until 2007. He became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1993. In addition to his studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg, he maintained a studio in New York from 1994 until 2016. Wolfgang Petrick took part in documenta 6 in Kassel in 1976, and in 1991, his work was shown at the Venice Biennale.
Collections
Works by HELMA and Wolfgang Petrick are included in distinguished private collections, among them the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection in Berlin and the Jutta and Manfred Heinrich Art Collection in Maulbronn. Petrick’s work is also held in the collections of the Academy of Arts Berlin, the Berlinische Galerie, the Neue Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the German Federal Art Collection, and the Woods Art Institute in Wentorf, where a retrospective of his oeuvre was presented in 2022–2023.