Petra Wunderlich

Petra Wunderlich is an artist renowned for her photographs of sacred architecture, including Christian church facades, synagogues, and quarries. For her series of black-and-white photographs, the artist employs a landscape format and presents the buildings in detail from a central perspective.

Biography of Petra Wunderlich

Petra Wunderlich was born in 1954 in Gelsenkirchen, Nordrhein Westfalen, Germany. From 1975 to 1985, she studied Painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Later, from 1985 to 1988, the artist studied photography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Hochschule für Bildende Künste under Bernd Becher.

From 1994 to 1999, Petra Wunderlich served as a lecturer at Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Luzern.

Her solo exhibitions include "La Plaiv" at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art in Frankfurt a. M. (2024), "Zuoz" at Galerie Tschudi in Zuoz (2022), "Petra Wunderlich – Stefan Gritsch" at Galerie Bernhard Fine Art in Frankfurt a. M. (2017), "Compilation Places" at Galerie Tschudi in Zuoz (2014), and many more.

Additionally, Wunderlich's works have been featured in numerous group shows, including "Line Up" at Galerie Tschudi in Zürich (2022), "Silver Lining" at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art in Frankfurt a. M. (2020), "50 Years of Konrad Fischer Galerie 1967 – 2017" at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf (2017), "Von Hier Bis Jetzt" at Kunstraum in Düsseldorf (2014), among others.

Currently, the artist divides her time between Düssseldorf, Luzern and New York. 

Petra Wunderlich's Art Style

Petra Wunderlich’s work focuses on sacred architecture. Her minimalist aesthetic initially appears to disregard the eternal nature traditionally associated with these buildings, as her analog photographs lack a sense of the sublime. Instead, the photographer shifts her focus to the relentless gentrification of cities and urban development, as well as the quarries that carve massive craters into the landscape.

Her visual language is influenced by the "Neues Sehen" tradition of the Düsseldorf Becher School, which established conceptual photography as a distinct art form from the 1970s to the 1990s. Her work features formally austere and unadorned compositions, reflecting a keen interest in industrial architecture.

Wunderlich’s fascination with the preservation of time and the concept of transience has led her to use analog photography as the primary medium for her work. Her close connection to Conceptual Art and Minimal Art is evident in her deliberate exclusion of people and narrative details. In her work, which is featured in various collections, she focuses on the urban landscape as a reflection of society.

The photographs she took are printed on Japanese paper with a high silver content, lending them an allure reminiscent of Eugène Atget's prints. This aesthetic, along with the cropped perspectives, is a consistent element throughout Petra Wunderlich's work, linking her concepts to art and architectural history.