A member of a loose-knit generation of German figurative painters known as the Leipzig School, Norbert Wagenbrett adaped the 1920s style Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) to contemporary portraiture. He studied at Leipzig University, which had been dominated for decades by the art concepts of Werner Tübke, Bernhard Heisig and Wolfgang Mattheuer.

This “intellectual painting” was a fertile basis for the artist´s portraits of people, which were also rooted in the New Objectivity and the verism of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties. However, Wagenbrett is concerned with the present day, fervently seeking people’s unknown faces behind their everyday masks. With his highly disciplined and delicate painting technique, he ...