Peter Wirth Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1956 - d. 2003

Born in 1956, Peter Wirth's creative work was predominantly inspired by the 1970s. Conceptualism is often perceived as a response to Minimalism, and the leading art movement of the 1970s, challenging the boundaries of art with its revolutionary features. The movements that ensued were all representative of a strong desire to evolve and consolidate the art world, in response to the tensions of the previous decade. Process art branched out from Conceptualism, featuring some of its most essential aspects, but going further in creating mysterious and experimental artistic journeys, while Land Art brought creation to the outdoors, initiating early philosophies of environmentalism.

In Germany, Expressive figure painting was given a second chance for the first time since the decline of Abstract Expressionism almost twenty years ago, the genre reclaimed its distinction through the brushstrokes of Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. The cosmopolitan and sophisticated position that New York city held in the 1960s remained just as influential in the 1970s. With multiple global renowned artists gravitating the galleries and downtown scene, the city once again strengthened its reputation as the artistic hub of the generation. Most of the critically acclaimed artists from the 1960s, who had gained success and fame, kept their status in the 1970s. Andy Warhol was a prominent figure of those two decades, and in the 1970s started to experiment with film and magazine publishing, thus engaging in a cross-cultural activity that no other visual artist of such standard had previously undertaken. By doing so, he secured his status as a celebrity. Street art started to appear as a true and accepted form of art towards the end of the 1970s. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were pioneers in demonstrating that their artworks could exist at the same time in art galleries and on city walls. Fuelled by graffiti art, street art from its earliest days proved that it could endure in a perpetual flux of self-transformation, endlessly shifting the limits of modern art, becoming a truly ground-breaking artistic genre. All over, various movements defined the 1970s.

Amongst others, feminism and the innovative radical ideologies it entailed strongly influenced the visual culture. Photorealism, which had emerged in the 1960s, also gained critical and commercial success. The critical, leading artistic figures of New York city started to embrace painters and sculptors from Latin America. The Arte Povera movement, which emerged in Italy, received global distinction in the 1970s, and leading figures such as Jannis Kounnelis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto were critically acclaimed. The critically engaged Mono-Ha movement, comprised of Japanese and Korean artists, flourished in Tokyo in the 1970s. Discarding conventional ideas of representation, the artists favoured a depiction of the world through an engagement with materials and an exploration of their properties. The artworks would often consist of encounters between natural and industrial materials such as stone, glass, cotton, sponge, wood, oil and water, mostly left intact.