Wolfgang Lettl painted the series "13 Attempts to Become a Rooster" in 1977/1978. The series can be seen as a surrealist curriculum. At the end of this series there is a self-portrait, not because Lettl liked to see himself or even paint: he just needed to see himself in the mirror every morning to shave; in his more than 60 years of work he has created only six self-portraits, inside with a pictorial work consisting of 500-600 works. The self-portrait with the rooster's beak stems from an interpretation that emerged in this series of works. At the end of the day there is the awareness that it is not important to become a rooster, but rather to demonstrate that you are a Person in the most varied situations of life and this, as can be seen from the example of the rooster, does not always succeed in the best way. . New challenges in life require us to try again and again to treat each other humanly. As humans we are never finished.

"I've never seen René Magritte.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always had the impression that to laugh he had to go down to the cellar. Was he suffering from great loneliness, or from inner coldness? I'm not the most sociable either, but in his being and in his paintings I see something repulsive, or at least alien to me. To be clearer: I perceive the elegant, tragic helplessness of his atheism. Perhaps (and I say "maybe" only because I don't want to pretend to express a clear judgment) he did the best that the "Classical Surrealism" of the time could achieve. His derailments, I think above all (but not only) of his "impressionist phase", show the tragedy of those who never walk a path and necessarily get lost in the process. But artists have the right to be judged for their best work. Anyone who wants to paint and, logically, cannot yet, is fascinated by role models and will try to imitate them. But he should not identify with the respective role model but soon take other paths, because everyone has his own inner life, his own beyond, and only that belongs to him. No surrealist can copy from another. What he paints necessarily becomes something previously unknown, even incomprehensible. Whether this should be called "surrealism" or not is irrelevant. You ask me to what extent René Magritte has influenced me in my work. Well, I looked at her photos and thought about it. Sometimes I have deliberately cited motifs from him or further developed them. I did something like this with Michelangelo and Titian, out of admiration, so to speak. And maybe something slipped inside me out of laziness or unconscious.

But not all apples are stolen somewhere. "

Text by Wolfang Lettl

In his speech at the opening of the exhibition: "To be human - an attempt" on December 15, 2006, Wolfgang Lettl made the following remarks about the image: "Yet she does not go away":

Don't expect me to tell you much about Goya's Marchesa de la Solana. I copied it because I liked it so much.

I can do it.

Then I freed it from its brown portrait background, took it a little off the center of the image, and placed it in an open landscape. No, not a beautiful landscape from the south, but rather a piece of the Po Valley with ugly industrial architecture and, in contrast to the proud Spaniard, three arrogant hollow heads in an impossible flying machine.

However, with freshly polished shoes.

Labyrinth (text: Wolfgang Lettl)

In my imagination, a labyrinth is such a complex and intricate structure that once you enter, you can hardly find your way back, except with Ariadne's thread. Getting lost in such a labyrinth is one of the fundamental experiences of modern man. Surrealism as a whole can be described as labyrinthine: many puzzles, many questions, no answers, no way out. I wanted to tackle the subject head on: painting a labyrinth. But with no ancient buildings or playful Rococo gardens; more like a mirrored wardrobe, but I couldn't find a way to represent it convincingly. I took refuge in a clear but unreal construction, open to be able to look inside, but with no exit, where not even the Ariadne's thread can help. Maybe you can imagine something similar, thanks to your dreams? With Kafka it became "The Trial".

Wolfgang Lettl painted the picture "The Scream" in June 1989, in his second home in Puglia. This is a further development of the "Prometheus" image of the "Gray Series".

First of all, he hits the massive clay-colored torso, with clumsy hands reaching up for help and his facial expression twisted in pain. It split in the chest area and a white bird flew out. The three bars inside the torso still give the impression of a cage or of being locked up.

The male torso is on the shore of a body of water, on which there are several boats, each with a figure inside. People kneeling or sitting in boats are blindfolded with black cloths and are intent on calming themselves with the surface of the water. There is a menacing and dark atmosphere in the sky.

This is for the description of the image.

Against the backdrop of contemporary history, this picture can be seen as a turnaround, peaceful revolution and the end of the GDR.

The bust became fragile from the inside out due to the people wanting freedom. With the symbolic cutting of the Hungarian barbed wire fence by Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock on June 27, the wall suddenly became permeable. In early July, there was a massive outbound movement of citizens from the GDR through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

How blind the SED leadership was to reality and how it tried not to let the waves beat too high will be more evident on 7 October 1989, "Republic Day" on the occasion of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the GDR.

Erich Honecker organized the usual jubilees and popular celebrations in Berlin for the last time, but the citizens no longer identified with the party ideology. There have been numerous counter-demonstrations that have been tried to repress by force.

The last bars finally broke on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

"Invitation to the coup", completed in 1981, is probably one of Wolfgang Lettl's most confusing paintings.

Everything becomes even more surreal by reading the newspaper article with surrealistic hues that Dr. Giacomino Vascello, inspired by the painting, reported to an Italian newspaper. Below is a brief summary of the article:

"INCREDIBLE: A foggiano made his contribution to the fall of the Berlin wall.

Dr. Vascello from Foggia and Wolfgang Lettl, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, have been good friends for many years, they meet in front of wine, good food and classical music to talk about the world of art, law and ethics. Wolfgang Lettl used the figure of Dr. Vascello for his painting "Invitation to the coup".

A few years pass and something extraordinary happens: in Germany, where election campaigns are much more based on posters and postcards than in Italy, an inexplicable whim of fate makes this painting chosen for the Campaign for the unification of the two Germanys. .

Since then, all the walls of Germany have been covered with this image, and hundreds of millions of postcard reproductions pass through the hands of millions of Germans. Both by joke and by coincidence, Dr. Vascello thus became the symbol of the spirit of the German nation.

All this was undoubtedly born between a glass of wine, Mozart's music and a bowl of steaming spaghetti but above all, of course, during discussions on the ethics of the state.

With his artist's eyes, the German painter saw the true spirit of the state in the obscure official of Southern Italy and wanted to pass on the fruit of his discovery to his compatriots and descendants.

And so a Foggia artist has become an indelible part of one of the most dramatic moments in recent history.

The "Venus Sipontina" is one of the 26 images in Wolfgang Lettl's "Gray Series" (1985-88)

The theme of the painting is respectively shown through a plate on the frame. On the back is an image attached, presumably painted on paper. There are objects on the frame.

In several variations of this series a classic element of the style of Surrealism is experimentally employed: Paint things that do not fit into an unreal space and surprising, more or less significant compositions will result.

In this picture, Wolfgang Lettl uses a nude of his wife and lover Franziska, which he painted in the Impressionist style as a background image.

In this regard he thought: “Your wife as a model is the ideal case, she is always available and if something is still missing in a painting, she can be laid down, she is always fine. As time goes by, you know it by heart, then you no longer need a model, or only very rarely a detail. Even the clothespins are always at my disposal, even if they are beautifully colored and lie so wonderfully still, that they cannot compete with my Venus. "

In the. last 10 years of his life, Wolfang Lettl collaborated intensively with his son, Florian. This made possible the creation of over 100 surreal paintings between 1998 and 2007, despite a serious illness and the decline of physical and mental abilities. As for the last painting shown here, Florian Lettl not only collaborated intensely on the development of the theme, but also finished the painting to make it available for exhibition. After Wolfgang Lettl lost his strength and realized he could no longer paint, he decided to die. He died on February 10, 2008 in the arms of his son Florian, surrounded by his paintings.

On the one hand, this final painting shows the conductor and his orchestra in an upward movement. Art comes from the unconscious, it is hidden in this painting in the depths of the water. It is the artist's creative act that elevates it to the light of day and makes it visible.

In contrast to the black-clad conductor who reaches out with both arms, with the wand emphasizing the upward movement, the white marble sculpture of San Bruno by René-Michel Slodtz, known as Michel-Ange Slodtz (1705- 1764), is already standing on its pedestal. The sculpture was made in 1744 for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

One hand of the Saint makes a gesture of refusal, the other is pointing downwards. For compositional reasons, the painting lacks both the putto who wants to present the bishop's insignia to the saint, and the attributes of the saint (skull, chain and book) to which the hand is pointing.

The gestures of the painting therefore refer to the conductor and his work; they admonish the artist to modesty and discreetly remind him of his transience.

When Wolfgang Lettl, in 1972, replied to a small advertisement in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in which a building plot near Manfredonia was offered for sale, he certainly did not imagine that the period he would spend there with his wife Francesca from 1973 to 2005 , he would become one of the happiest in his life for him.

Here, in the years 1975-1995, not only the impressionistic paintings were born, but, starting from 1986 also many of his surrealistic paintings.

Wolfgang Lettl: "We bought a piece of land in Siponto, in the Gulf of Manfredonia, directly on the sea, because according to my old geographical atlas it rains less than anywhere else, and we built a house there. There was a lot of work to do in the garden, because, at first, there were only thistles and other thorny things. In the house the walls were still empty. So I took my portable easel and went outside, painting the landscape: houses, trees, mountains, clouds, ships and the sea. Doing it is fun and really tiring. "

The sculpture represents two people, each with its heavy sphere, to be carried upwards. They appear to be two Sisyphus. The myth of Sisyphus tells that in order to punish the sagacity of the man who had dared to challenge the gods, Zeus decided that Sisyphus should have pushed a boulder from the base to the top of a mountain. However, every time Sisyphus reached the top, the boulder rolled back to the base of the mountain and each time, and for eternity, Sisyphus would have to start his climb all over again and never succeed.

Albert Camus, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus of 1942, saw in Sisyphus the personification of the absurdity of human life, which would leave suicide as the solution, even if the "physical" one does not solve the problem of meaning; but Camus concludes his philosophical thoughts by stating: "We must imagine Sisyphus happy and free while climbing the weight that rolls down." Here in the sculpture the Sisyphus has doubled, but they will never reach the top as the two characters get in the way of each other. But the absurdity is that they cannot understand the reason that prevents them from moving forward. We who can see the situation from far away, in an objective way, we know that if you bend your head under the heavy load you cannot see what the other is doing, as your gaze is directed only towards your own feet and you only feel that nothing is going on. that we are loved by a God and not condemned to make this commitment as Sisyphus. The sphere is the symbol of our earthly mission, it is the weight we bear every day with our ability and our will, this is important for us, for our life, for our mission. We work by supporting this sphere every day, in private life as well as in political life. But if the spheres become burdens, weights, as it would appear in this sculpture, they prevent us from seeing one another and do not allow us to get to the top, to then be happy and free as we climb the weight that rolls down, we need to rethink our mission, rectify our doctrines, overcome our selfishness. We must set apart the spheres to give our neighbor a hand, to help each other to arrive at the goal together and not to put obstacles and hindrances between each other.