A. R. Penck
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Ralf Winkler, alias A.R. Penck (born 5 October
1939) is a German painter, printmaker and sculptor.
He was born in Dresden, East Germany, and studied together with a
group of other neo-expressionist painters in Dresden. He became one of
the foremost exponents of the new figuration alongside Jorg Immendorff,
Georg Baselitz and Markus Lupertz. Under the communist regime, they
were watched by the secret police and were considered dissidents. In
the late 1970s they were included in shows in West Berlin and were
seen as exponents of free speech in the East. Their work was shown by
major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. They
were included in a number of important shows including the famous
Zeitgeist exhibition in the well-known Martin Gropius Bau museum and
the important New Art show at the Tate in 1983.
In the 1980s he became known worldwide for paintings with
pictographic, neo-primitivist imagery of human figures and other
totemic forms. He was included in many important shows both in London
and New York.
Penck's sculptures, though less familiar, evoke the same primitive
themes as his paintings and drawings and use common everyday materials
such as wood, bottles, cardboard boxes, tin cans, masking tape,
tinfoil, wire and are crudely painted and assembled. Despite the
anti-art aesthetic the rough and ready quality of their construction,
they have the same symbolic, archetypal anthropomorphic forms as his
flat symbolic paintings. The paintings are influenced by Paul Klee's
work and mix the flatness of Egyptian or Mayan writing with the
crudity of the late black paintings by Jackson Pollock. The sculptures
are often reminiscent of the stone heads of Easter Island and other
Oceanic art.
A keen drummer, he was a member of rock group "Triple Trip Touch" and
took every opportunity to play with some of the best Jazz musicians of
the late 1980s including Butch Morris, organising events at his
country mansion in Heimbach in 1990 involving installations by Lennie
Lee, performances by Anna Homler and paintings by Christine Kuhn
A.R. Penck lives and works in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Dublin and New York.
