Petrus Wandrey (8 March 1939 – 11 May 2012) was a German artist who lived and worked in Hamburg. Wandrey studied at Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg (fashion school located at Armgartstraße), from 1960 to 1963, and from 1963 to 1968 at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. He was influenced by Surrealism, Pop Art and the Dada movement.
Wandrey was fascinated by science and technology. These subjects frequently appear in his work, influenced by the simplicity and brilliance of digital image culture. He proclaimed the Digitalist Movement with the delivery of his panel Science and Beyond at Fordham University, New York, in 1978. The work integrates vertical and horizontal pixel sequences, the smallest square-shaped units displayed on the monitor screen. Pixels create a characteristic silhouette with typically jagged outlines that become one of the trademarks of Wandrey's multi-faceted and highly diverse palette of visual imagery. Another distinctive characteristic in many of his works is his use of computer junk or individually manufactured hardware as elements in the creative process.
Early years
Ulrich Carl Peter Wandrey was born in Dresden. He worked in many creative fields including painting, sculpture, installation art, graphics, art objects, furniture design, jewelry design, and textile design. He initially was a designer and illustrator of countless record sleeves for classic, jazz and rock music. He then designed covers for Der Spiegel and Capital magazines, illustrations for Playboy, Stern, TransAtlantik magazines and for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. He also created numerous posters, for instance for the Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies Chinese Roulette (1976) and Despair (1978), and for rock stars. Wandrey then used the proceeds from these commissions to finance his own independent work.
In 1975 he travelled to Port Lligat in Spain where he gave his work Venus' Wind to his idol Salvador Dalí as a birthday present. Dalí then put Wandrey's Venus on permanent show in the Mae West Room at his Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres, Spain.
1974–1983: The Dawn of Digitalism
Wandrey almost accidentally discovers the language of shapes that he had long been seeking. Among other things he is inspired by the visual characteristics of the first computer games produced by the multimedia electronics company Atari, and by the transmission of the Arecibo message in 1975 with its concise binary digital information about life on earth and the position of our planet in the solar system. Wandrey utilizes the design scope of grids and pixel graphics to analogically create his sculptures and pictures. The fascination of Pop Art, Surrealism, the undefined Dada movement and the language of shapes of the digital age form the basis of his artistic innovation and his analysis of the logic of binary imagery.
In 1978 Wandrey proclaimed his Digitalism in New York with his panel Science and Beyond. Since then he studied and experimented with the extensive possibilities of digital art work. According to Wandrey, the digital language of form does not allow recognizable national or continental features to dominate. Moreover, it is the first symbolic composition method to be globally comprehensible and accepted by people of all nations.
The aesthetic assessment of hardware and its inclusion in art work results in countless experiments. Their intrinsic nature induces Wandrey to investigate the materiality of high-tech tools and the aesthetic attraction of electronic components such as printed circuit boards, laserdiscs, laser diodes, microchips, cable bundles, heat sink units and plotter prints used in chip assembly. The formal principle of his digital art also includes components extracted from computer junk, as in the installation Personal Identity (1994) and the objects Angel of Recycling 1-3 (1992–1996). The computer is literally disemboweled to construct provoking sculptures and assemblies and combine seemingly contradictory elements. Wandrey calls for "an alliance of art and technology" and characterizes his Digitalism of 1978 as "a stylistic tendency in the visual arts that utilizes digital forms of representation and thus constitutes the form language for the epoch of digital technology".
In that Wandrey intentionally violates the user's manual, the electronic parts are transposed into a new, sometimes astonishing context. Through the intervention of the artist, they are simultaneously demystified and endowed with fresh mysteries.