About me
Paul Wans has worked as a freelance artist since 1981. From 1975, he studied painting and graphic design under Prof. M. Goppelsröder and Prof. W. Menning at the University of Duisburg. Since 1982, his art has focused on agricultural themes. He has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in exhibitions in European countries, America, and Asia.
He has been a member of the Federal Association of Visual Artists/Lower Rhine District since 1985, and was its chairman from 1987 to 1992 and again since 2022.
“His paintings are relentlessly modern, more modern than many trends of recent years. His pictures reveal the beauty of an upside-down, torn world. Situated between New Objectivity and Photorealism, they illustrate the end of kitsch, the transformation of landscape into farmland. Reality as art. It is a painting of radical detail, full of technical subtleties. In contrast to the content of his paintings, which I have emphasized, it is above all a masterly painting. His gaze magnifies wounds to the point of recognizability, as if under a microscope. For him, landscape painting is no longer the genre of utopia, the dream of the Garden of Eden. As historically conscious, historically progressive painting, it has nothing to do with the world and the painting of Vermeer and Brueghel, which were created only a few kilometers away and yet are light-years removed. It reveals the ugliness and perversion of our treatment of nature as the norm, and it reveals this ugliness with captivating beauty.” Jan Thorn-Prikker
