For Wolfgang Werkmeister (born 1941) etching already came to be the most important medium of his artistic career while he was still studying at the Stuttgart art academy. Around the same time he was first drawn to Northern Germany where the coastal landscape became his preferred subject.
To mark the artist’s 70th birthday, the Museum Kunst der Westküste is showing a selection of Wolfgang Werkmeister’s West Coast Series (1997-2001), 40 etchings depicting the North Frisian coast in a reduced, black and white palette. Using bold lines and nearly geometric shapes, Werkmeister is able to render the calm, the vastness and the particulars of this landscape. Marks of human activity such as jetties, fences or windmills enter into a high-contrast dialogue with the moving flow of the tides.
Over the course of his career Wolfgang Werkmeister developed into a technically brilliant etcher. Although adopting a realistic approach to image-making, he does not confine himself to artistically replicating the landscape; rather, his work always also involves feeling out a landscape’s basic compositional principles and the ambition of the artist to take what he sees and reinvent it in his etchings. His works have been frequently exhibited and can be found in the collections of major museums such as the Altonaer Museum, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen Schloss Gottdorf.