Nefertiti at the Egyptian Museum Berlin, 1993

Exhibition billboard outside the Egyptian Museum Berlin, two Peter Wirth posters flanking the bust of Nefertiti, 1993 — The exhibition announced outside the museum. Berlin, 1993.

In 1993 the Egyptian Museum in Berlin gave Peter Wirth a solo exhibition. It was called Mutmaßungen über Nofretete — Conjectures on Nefertiti — and it hung his paintings among the granite columns, a few rooms from the bust itself. His record lists sixteen solo exhibitions between 1977 and 2019; this one hung in a museum.

He had not been invited. He had sent the museum's director the catalogue of his own work, unasked, and the exhibition followed from that.

Six years of paintings came first

Between 1987 and 1992 he painted the Egyptian cycle: more than sixty canvases, acrylic on unprimed cotton canvas, worked over and scraped back until the famous profile is barely a profile any more. That was the point. Prof. Dr. Dietrich Wildung, who ran the collection from 1989 to 2009 and wrote the catalogue text, put it better than we can — his two passages are on the artist's page, quoted with his kind permission.

Peter Wirth paintings hung between red granite columns at the Egyptian Museum Berlin, 1993 — The works in the museum, among the granite columns.

And it did not stop there

Twelve years later he came back to the same head, in a different material. In 2004 and 2005 he cut a series of linocuts — Nefertiti again, and Chephren beside her — flat colour, hard edges, the profile reduced to a few cuts. Where the paintings dissolve the image, the linocuts sharpen it. Same question, opposite answer, eighteen years apart.

What we can print, and what we cannot

Peter Wirth photographed the Egyptian paintings in the years when a good camera made a two-megapixel file, and the linocuts were photographed no better. Those files are honest at one size and no larger: a sheet of 8 × 10 inches, printed at full resolution with nothing upscaled. That is why this series is offered in a single small format while the rest of the shop goes further. We would rather sell you a small print that is right than a large one that is guessed.

Eighteen sheets are available — ten after the paintings, eight after the Nefertiti linocuts. The eight linocut sheets are prints after original linocuts; they are not linocuts, and each product page says so. Everything is open edition, and the signature on each sheet is printed, not applied by hand. See the series.

Larger sizes wait on new photography of the originals. That is the next piece of work in this archive, and it is not a quick one. If you would like to know when it is done, write to studio@divineeditions.com and say Nefertiti. We will tell you first.