"Cyberwar" Print

DETLEV "Nick" PETERS Born 1936 in Minden/Germany studied art and drama in Munich at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität - 1957-59. Peters switched to political sciences and journalism after the Berlin wall was built in 1961. At the end of his studies in Berlin and in Washington D.C. at Georgetown University he took a doctor's degree at the Faculty of Arts of the Free University of Berlin (FU) in 1964. Detlev (Nick) started painting 1957 in Munich. After his studies he worked as a journalist in Munich, Berlin and New York. In 1967 he joined the civil service of his government in Bonn and became a counsellor with the German Press & Information Office. In 1970 Peters was apppointed Consul for Cultural and Public Affairs at the (West) German General Consulate in New York. It was in NYC - where he resumed painting and tried again a "modern renaissance" of the Russian Avantgarde. His first abstract works are close to constructivism and suprematism. Peters experimented with a kind of painting which had no literal subject. It was, instead, simply an abstract composition of colours, shapes and figurative ideas. Like the Russian Avangardists the artist believes that the colours and elements have their own living rhythm, weight and importance. Critics say that Peters has taken a consistent progressive direction - demonstrating his diversity by elucidating abstract "non-objective" pictures. Peters likes to quote Vassili Kandinsky, who once said: "It is never literally true that any form is meaningless and says nothing. Every form in the world says something." Prof. Dennis C. Wepman, a New York art critic, said about Peters in 1987: "His paintings are always structurally sound and chromatically harmonious, but their great impact depends ultimately on the balance between form and content that informs them. The artist gives free, spontaneous expression to his private vision and allows the viewer to receive and to respond to it with his own. The result: an art of singular emotional and aesthetic integrity , and consequently one of profound emotional power." John A. Morkheimer, art critic of The New York Times, felt that "Nick Peters has introduced a new style of abstract art which will inspire the art world and could fill it with enthusiasm.