C.O. Paeffgen (Claus Otto Paeffgen, 1933–2019) was born in Cologne into the city's famous Päffgen brewing family — his cousin was the singer Nico, later a Velvet Underground vocalist and Andy Warhol muse. He shortened his own name to initials only once he committed himself fully to art, but that commitment took its time: he studied law in Cologne and Berlin, passing his first state exam in 1959 and his final examination in 1962, and did not begin painting seriously until 1970.

He first became known not through painting but through Umwicklungen — banal found objects, toy figures, and discarded household items wound tightly in thick wire until they hardened into wall and floor sculptures, elevating the throwaway detritus of consumer culture into something closer to relic. Alongside this, he developed Umrandungen (outlines): newspaper and magazine photographs enlarged many times over, their contours traced in felt-tip pen and reworked with ironic, often biting commentary, exposing the banality of mass media by isolating and redrawing it — a distinctly German response to Pop Art's fascination with consumer imagery, sharper in tone than its American counterpart. Recurring symbolic motifs — a heart pierced by an arrow, a mouse, a bow, a crescent moon, a question mark — surfaced across both bodies of work, a private vocabulary repeated until it functioned almost like signature.

By the 1980s, Paeffgen had built a national reputation as a distinctive, wry voice in German art, an outsider by temperament who preferred going his own way over institutional favour. The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden staged his first major museum exhibition in 1987, gathering nearly 100 paintings and drawings; the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the city of his birth, honoured him with a full retrospective in 1999. In the 1990s he extended his practice further, painting directly onto discarded fruit and vegetable crates and producing numerous multiples alongside his prints. He died in Cologne on 5 June 2019, aged 85.

His Umwicklungen — wall and floor sculptures built from everyday objects and toys wound in thick wire — established his early reputation, transforming consumer detritus into something between relic and warning.

His Umrandungen series, tracing and reworking enlarged newspaper photographs of public figures including Charles de Gaulle and John and Jackie Kennedy, turned mass-media portraiture into ironic commentary on fame, authority, and the flattening effect of repeated reproduction.

Objekte in Farbe (Objects in Colour), a 1990s series of acrylic paintings applied directly onto discarded fruit and vegetable crates, extended his lifelong interest in consumer detritus into painting itself — everyday packaging material repurposed as the canvas, not merely the subject.

C.O. Paeffgen's prints extend both signature methods directly onto paper — offset lithographs and screenprints that carry his traced, ironic Umrandungen technique, alongside editions referencing his wire-wrapped object sculptures. His 1992 portrait series, including Scheich, Charles de Gaulle, and Polizist, applies the same outlined, ironically flattened treatment across a consistent format and edition size, translating his newspaper-derived method into a genuinely coherent, collectible body of work.

Because his unique paintings and sculptures generally trade between €10,000 and €25,000 at auction, his signed prints and editions — most produced in editions of 50 to 100 — offer considerably more accessible entry into a genuinely original, idiosyncratic postwar German practice.

For collectors, Paeffgen's editions offer direct access to an artist who treated mass media's own imagery as raw material, decades before appropriation became a familiar strategy. Works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum Ludwig, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Berlinische Galerie.