13 Attempts to Become a Rooster - 4

The series "13 Attempts to Become a Rooster" dates back to the years 1977/78.

The series may be considered a surreal Curriculum Vitae.

The fourth image shown here recreates the fantasy world of a child with his toys in a cheerful hilly landscape. The rooster's rump is reminiscent of cloth diapers, but the other brightly coloured body parts are made of wood. Even the sun and the moon become wooden toys. Only the hole and cracks in the little hill at left in the foreground point towards the fragility of this world.

Wolfgang Lettl remembers: "I don't know how old I was, maybe ten, when my father took me to the Alte Pinakothek. I was fascinated with the glorious colours of the medieval altar paintings. I had never seen anything like it. I don't know if the wish to become a painter had its first secret stirrings in me then. It seemed inconceivable to me that I would ever be able to create anything like that. Later on I learned that in art you always have to do what you really don't know how to do, or it gets boring.