With his work, HAP (Helmut Andreas Paul) Grieshaber liberated the woodcut from its servile function as a means of reproduction in order to lead it - especially in the large-format hand prints - to an artistic independence that equals the panel painting. Thus, as the most important and influential innovator of the woodcut in the 20th century, he combines the woodcut technique known since the Middle Ages and rediscovered by the Expressionists with a modern pictorial and formal language. The trained typesetter and graphic artist acquired the skills of a woodcarver primarily through self-tuition. Grieshaber worked the woodblocks into relief with mallets, stabbing bags, drills, saws, and the flex. The intensity and power of the prints subsequently allow the viewer to still feel the massive mass and physical exertion in dealing with the material wood. But also formally Grieshaber has left behind an unmistakable work with the interplay of archaic forms and original natural feeling. By consistently adhering to the supra-temporal theme of the human figure, he advanced to become the father figure of the "New Figuration".
Triggers for Grieshaber's pictorial inventions were personal experiences, as well as the consternation before experienced contemporary events. His woodcuts address the relationship between man and nature, basic human hopes, desires and fears from his own experience and feelings. Nikolai B. Forstbauer, among others, differentiates the many-sided aspects of his artistic personality and the simultaneously emerging threads of reception: the "homme engagé," "the spokesman for the workshop idea, the pioneer of a unity of art and life, the great artist with Documenta honors, the bridge builder between East and West Germany, the teacher, the instigator. And Manfred Schneckenburger celebrates Grieshaber as a European artist "who never let the dialogue break off, especially with Paris - and in his respective first formal steps in wood, on paper, nevertheless relied on an old German reduction of hard outline forms."