A.R. Penck

The important Neo-Expressionist painter, A.R. Penck, was born Ralf Winkler in Dresden, Germany, in 1939. As an adult, he was closely linked with other East-German exponents of the new figuration, including Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz, all of whom were watched by the secret police and considered dissidents. In the late 1970s Penck's work was included in several shows in West Berlin, and he came to be seen as an important exponent of free speech in the East. Both the violence he witnessed in Dresden as a youth and the aggression and oppression of later twentieth-century politics have remained central themes in his work, which is known for its pictographic, Neo-Primitivist imagery of human figures and other totemic forms. This concise exhibition catalogue brings together works made from 1983 to 1989, so that key signature Standart figure paintings can be seen juxtaposed with some of the artist's less well known work. Essayist Siegfried Gohr writes, "Penck's dual gift, both intellectual and aesthetic, permits him to gaze fearlessly at phenomena from which others have long turned away, whether out of the inability to cope that leads to repression or out of the overconfidence that leads to hasty, noncommittal abstraction. Penck works against the illusions and delusions caused by the way things really are."