A. R. Penck

AR Penck ( born October 5, 1939 in Dresden), actually Ralf Winkler ( pseudonyms were Mike Hammer, TM, Mickey Spilane, aY or quite simply the Y ) is a German painter, printmaker and sculptor.

Life

Winkler took from 1953 to 1954 painting and drawing lessons with Jürgen Böttcher ( artist name Strawalde ). 1955-1956 he worked as a draftsman at DEWAG in teaching. Since 1956 he applied unsuccessfully four times at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and at the College of Fine and Applied Arts in Berlin (East). Although he claimed that he had been denied this due to his political views, but in fact it was his talent as insufficient. After termination of the apprenticeship, he then worked as a fireman, security guard, postman and a small actor among others in the movie Born in '45 by Jürgen Böttcher, who had taken him in 1961 in his short documentary banned three of many.

In 1966, Winkler was the candidate of the Association of Visual Artists, now under the alias AR Penck, which was chosen by the geologist and researcher Albrecht Penck ice age. Since 1969 he increasingly got into trouble with the state security service of the DDR: Penck's pictures were confiscated, his membership in the Association of Artists of the GDR ( VBK ) was rejected.

Winkler joined in 1971 the group of artists gap at. From 1973 he worked under the pseudonym Mike Hammer and TM (also contracted: TM ). After his military service in 1974 and especially the award of Will Grohmann Award - 1975 by the Academy of the Arts in West Berlin and the checks of national security increased. Penck in 1976 met the West German fellow painter Jörg Immendorff, with whom he worked in the following years. In her work, she campaigned for both the abolition of the German - German border as well as dissidents, including Rudolf Bahro and Robert Havemann. Starting in 1977, the customs confiscated the painting Winkler - the signed since 1976 with Y.

In May 1979 several papers and training records were destroyed during a break in the studio Winkler. On August 3, 1980, he emigrated to the West. He lived first in Kerpen near Cologne. 1981 awarded him the Goethe Foundation in Basel the Rembrandt Award. In 1983, Winkler to London and got awarded the 1985 Art Prize of Aachen. In 1984 he was on the show from here - represented two months new German art in Dusseldorf. In 1988 he participated in the exhibition Made in Cologne, the same year he was appointed professor of painting at the Dusseldorf Art Academy.

Since his retirement in 2003, lives and works Winkler in Dublin, Ireland.

Work

In his paintings he uses stick figures and graphic symbols, reminiscent of cave painting, Asian calligraphy and graffiti. So he created his standard images in the 1970s. This term is understood Penck an art movement that uses such a simple, archaic symbols that each viewer is able to penetrate the resulting images - such as traffic signs or trademarks. 1995 established the 2.5 -tonne standard plastic T ( x) in Dresden on the roof of art'otel. The bronze sculpture is 6.4 meters high.

Penck was a participant in Documenta 5 7 (1982) and the Documenta IX in 1992 in Kassel in 1972 in the Department of Individual mythologies and also on the Documentation as an artist. For the Documenta 6 (1977 ) images were provided by him, this was prevented by the action of an unofficial employee of the State Security of the GDR on a Hessian parliament.

Penck was counted in the 1980's to the " New Wild ". During this time he also worked as a drummer in the group Triple Trip Touch (aka TTT and TTT ), which he founded together with Frank Wollny - frequent joint appearances with Frank Wright, Frank Lowe, Jeanne Lee, Alan Silva, Peter Kowald Helge Leiberg, Clarence Sharpe and Louis Moholo followed.

For the French winery Château Siran, one of the nine wineries of the Crus Bourgeois Classification Exceptionnels, he designed the label for the vintage year 1989, for the year in which the Berlin Wall fell.

In 1991 he designed for a BMW Z1 BMW as BMW Art Car.

On 12 November 2005, the sculpture was " The Heavenly fallers " damaged ( a five-piece marble ensemble) that created Penck in collaboration with Frank Breidenbruch and their value was probably several hundred thousand euros, by the ghost ride a driverless excavator. The sculpture was originally inaugurated on 13 November 1996 in Wuppertal.

Works in public collections

• Art Collection German Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main
• Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich
• Küppersmühle Museum of Modern Art, Duisburg
• Walter Art Museum, Augsburg
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
• Städel, Frankfurt am Main
• Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• Dresden Municipal Gallery (Collection of Jürgen pigs Braden )
• Musée d' Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, Strasbourg
• Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden

Literature and sources

• Ingrid Pfeiffer, AR Penck, Isabelle Graw, Harald Kunde, Kewin Power, Pirkko Rathgeber, Jürgen pigs Braden: AR Penck: Works 1961-2001 Dt. / Engl Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-937572-68-0.
• Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
• Documenta Archive (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X
• Catalog for Documenta 6: Volume 1: painting, sculpture / Environment, Performance; Volume 2: Photography, Film, Video; Volume 3: drawings, utopian design, books; Kassel 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00- X
• Catalog: documenta 7 in Kassel; Vol 1: ( Visual biographies of artists ); Vol 2: ( Current work of the artist); Kassel 1982 ISBN 3-920453-02-6
• Documenta IX in Kassel, June 13 - 20th September 1992 - Catalogue in three volumes; Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-89322-380-0 ( German ) / ISBN 3-89322-381-9 (English)
• Anke Scharnhorst: Penck, AR In: . Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2 Ch links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4.