A. R. Penck

(Dresden, Germany, 1939 - 2017, Zürich, Switzerland)

German

Ralf Winkler, better known by the alias A.R. Penck, was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor, and jazz drummer. He is recognized primarily for Neo-Expressionist images featuring simplified stick figures in compositions reminiscent of cave paintings or other ancient or non-Western art. After witnessing the Allied firebombing of his hometown of Dresden in February 1945, Penck came of age during the Cold War, living first in Dresden and then in East Berlin under the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Penck and his peers were subjected to police surveillance because of the avant-garde style and political content of their work. In 1968, attempting to circumvent state restriction, he adopted the name of the eminent geologist Albrecht Penck, an expert on the Ice Age, whose works he had been reading. Over time he also signed works with names including Mike Hammer and Mickey Spillane (a fictional detective and the American novelist who created him, respectively), as well as T.M., a.Y. and, and simply Y. Exposure and appreciation in the West often led to unwelcome attention—after showing work at Documenta in Kassel, West Germany in 1972, Penck was drafted into the army for six months. Finally, in 1980, he was able to leave East Germany (some accounts say he was expelled; in either case, he lost his East German citizenship in the process), eventually settling in Dublin and Düsseldorf. He was a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy for many years, beginning in 1989. After emigrating, Penck became a leading Neo-Expressionist artist, alongside the likes of Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz, and Markus Lüpertz. Penck received some artistic training via painting and drawing lessons in his early teen years, but his attempts to gain admission to East German art schools were unsuccessful. He resolved to pursue art independently in the mid-1950s and developed his simplified style in the 1960s. Alongside his stick figures and pictographic forms, he sometimes included a variety of symbols echoing mathematics, physics, and cybernetics, but as if conveyed in a forgotten and incomprehensible language. He called works in this broad idiom Standarts, a combination of “standard” and “art” that also echoed the German “Standarte,” meaning banner or flag. The term thus suggests both Penck’s aspiration to universal communication and his interest in bold, graphic appeal. In this fashion his works can resemble both contemporary billboards and ancient cave paintings. Despite this flattened and simplified appearance, however, they can also convey the deep frustrations, anxieties, and divisions of the Cold War.

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