Before One’s Eyes, in Mind. Friedrich Wilhelm Fretwurst

With this exhibition we honour the work of the painter and graphic artist Friedrich Wilhelm Fretwurst on the occasion of his 90th birthday. The name Fretwurst is a familiar one on the Fischland peninsula. Friedrich Wilhelm was born in Ahrenshoop-Althagen in 1936 – at a time when Hans Brass, Alfred Partikel, Dora Koch-Stetter and other artists now regarded as modern classics of Ahrenshoop were working there. Since 1997, Fretwurst has lived and worked in his ancestors’ house in Dändorf on the Saaler Bodden.

After studying art education in Greifswald, he studied free painting and graphic art at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee in the 1960s and subsequently lived in Berlin for many years. In Greifswald, he absorbed ideas from the Bauhaus through Herbert Wegehaupt (1905–1959); in East Berlin, Fritz Dähn (1908–1980) passed on impulses from the international modernism that was still regarded as formalist at the time. But younger voices of the Berlin School also inspired his work, including that of the draughtsman Dieter Goltzsche (b. 1934).

During his time in Berlin, Fretwurst became part of a circle of friends and colleagues in which artistic friction with the world combined with the things of everyday life, the existential backdrop they bear witness to, and the desire to honour what was perceived as significant – in contrast to the ideological programme of artistic optimism in the GDR. What he captured visually and atmospherically in the urban space of Berlin, on journeys to more distant parts of the world, and especially on his native coast, Fretwurst has often taken directly into his art, delighting in the uniqueness of the moment. He always keeps pencil and sketchpad at hand to capture what he sees. In this way, thousands of sketch sheets have been created, storing memories.

The most important and most difficult part of his work, however, takes place in the studio, when he returns to the notes made at the scene of experience and transforms them into pictures: into paintings and larger drawings. This is where the problematisation begins, the dialogue with what has been remembered. In his search for the essential, he absolutely needs colour, must be a painter, and must make things harder for himself than in drawing – must take risks, especially with colour – and revise himself, remaining in dialogue with the picture. It is this ongoing process that keeps the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Fretwurst in motion to this day, giving it its living quality.

https://kunstmuseum-ahrenshoop.de/veranstaltung/friedrich-wilhelm-fretwurst-zum-90-geburtstag/