Albert Wigand

Albert Wigand, a native of Hesse, chose Dresden as his adopted home from 1925. Another 20 years passed before he found his way into the public eye with his art. During the GDR regime, he was a silent refusenik who withdrew from the official exhibition business. And although he was anti-academic and never taught himself, he had exerted an influence on the younger Dresden generation, such as Dottore and Strawalde. Initially, his imagery told of his everyday world, of simple things - of streets, houses and their insides, from lamps to cooking pots. While muted colors still prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s, Wigand developed toward colorism after a cubist phase. His painting was trained on Frenchmen such as Paul Cézanne, Herni Matisse and Pablo Picasso. He had already become acquainted with these during his studies as an art teacher, which he had prematurely abandoned. In his late work, he intensified the deformation that had already taken place by cutting up pictures and putting them together on a new pictorial ground to form abstract figures. Later he pursued this artistic strategy in sculpture as well. (EW)