The Junge Wilden — Young Wild Ones, also called Neue Wilden — were the next-generation Berlin painters who emerged in the late 1970s and peaked in the early 1980s. Salomé (Wolfgang Cihlarz, b. 1954), Rainer Fetting (b. 1949), Luciano Castelli (b. 1951), and Helmut Middendorf (b. 1953) were the most visible. They shared the core generation’s rejection of minimal and conceptual orthodoxies, but they added punk energy, queer subject matter, nightclub atmosphere, and high-key color to the movement’s vocabulary.
The Galerie am Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg, founded in 1977 by Fetting and others, was their primary venue. Where Baselitz and Kiefer worked through German historical trauma, the Junge Wilden worked through West Berlin present-tense: the Wall, the clubs, the gay scene, the punk subculture. Salomé’s gay-subject nudes, Fetting’s shower paintings and Berlin Wall series, Castelli’s androgynous self-portraits, and Middendorf’s nightlife scenes form a coherent body — younger, faster, brighter, and more immediately marketable.
Critics remain divided on their status: direct heirs to Neo-Expressionism or a market-driven imitation wave whose rapid rise and collapse (peak c. 1982–83; market crash by 1987–88) damaged the older painters’ reception. The documentary record supports both readings.
See also
- Georg Baselitz — the generation they followed
- Anselm Kiefer — the historical burden they did not carry
- Rainer Fetting — co-founder of Galerie am Moritzplatz
- Salomé — the queer figure
- Documenta 7 — where they appeared alongside the core generation