German artist Walter Dahn, known as a founding member of the “Junge Wilde” (Young Wild Ones) movement in Germany during the 1980s, has died in Cologne at 70. His representing gallery, Sprüth Magers, confirmed his death in a press statement on November 13th.
“With the loss of Walter Dahn, we bid farewell to a major artist whose wide-ranging work was in many respects visionary,” Sprüth Magers shared in a press statement. “His goal was to never succumb to ideology—to not be restricted by any style, to always preserve an openness in his approach.”
Born in 1954 in Tönisvorst, Germany, Dahn graduated with a master’s degree in painting from Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1977. Shortly before graduating, the artist presented his first solo exhibitions at Galerie Philomene Magers in Bonn and Konrad Fischers Raum in Düsseldorf, both in 1976.
Dahn’s paintings from the early 1980s were characterized by haphazard brushwork and vibrant figuration. During this time, Dahn helped form the short-lived Neo-Expressionist group Mülheimer Freiheit, commonly known as “Junge Wilde,” alongside artists Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Hans Peter Adamski, and Peter Bömmels. This group rejected the established, overly intellectual language around Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
Much of Dahn’s work interrogated the medium of painting itself, often criticizing an increasingly capitalist art world. His early works helped lay the foundation for the “Bad Painting” movement in the late ’70s through the ’80s. His work was featured in the 1982 edition of Documenta.
By the late 1980s, Dahn abandoned painting; he turned to screen printing, photography, drawing, and film. His screen prints—which he named “anti-silkscreens”—were never made into editions. He produced one print and then immediately disposed of the screen. These works collaged a wide range of inspirations, from famous punk albums by the Sex Pistol and The Smiths to ethnological photographs of Indigenous Australians.
From 1995 to 2017, Dahn taught painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Brunswick, Germany. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Venus Over Manhattan in New York, The Modern Institute in Glasgow, Sprüth Magers, and Kunstmuseum Basel, among many others. His work is currently on view at Haus Mödrath–Räume für Kunst in Kerpen, Germany.
