A pioneer of ‘Bad Painting’, and co-founder of the significant Mülheimer Freiheit group, Walter Dahn developed a style of painting.
This questioned the idea of the medium in his simplifications and appropriation of slogans, influencing a generation of artists known as the Neue Wilde (New Fauves) movement in 1970s and 1980s Germany.
‘We were all people who came from simple or middle-class backgrounds. The wild is also a large part of the attitude at that moment’, noted Dahn. The punk movement was an important influence for him and those painters around him. Indeed, Dahn explained ‘For us, like the punk musicians, it was about creating images that we wanted to see but didn’t exist’.
