А.Р. Пенк: Художник и его мир

German painter

Penck participated at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, and also at Documenta 7 (1982) and Documenta IX in 1992. He was meant to exhibit at the Documenta 6 (1977), but was prevented to do so by the influence of an unofficial employee of the State Security of the GDR on a Hessian parliamentarian.

On 3 August 1980, he moved to West Germany. He first lived in Kerpen, southwest of Cologne. After emigrating, Penck became one of the foremost exponents of new figuration, alongside Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. 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 Martin Gropius Bau museum and the New Art show at the Tate in 1983. In 1981, the Goethe Foundation awarded him the Rembrandt Prize in Basel, Switzerland. In 1983, Winkler moved to London, England, and was awarded the Aachen Art Prize for 1985. In 1988 he participated in the exhibition Made in Cologne. In the same year, he was appointed professor of painting at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. Some of his students are Antje Dorn, Susanne Themlitz, Joanna Danovska, Yoshimoto Nara, Marta Klonowska, Gesine Kikol and Andrea C. Hoffer. After retiring, in 2003, he moved to Dublin, Ireland, where he would live and work the following years.

An autodidact, he created in his paintings "worlds" and "experience spaces", filled with symbolic abbreviations. He used stick figures and graphic icons that seem reminiscent of cave paintings, Asian calligraphy and graffiti art. In the 1960s and 1970s, he created a series of paintings and sculptures that he called Standarts, a conflation of "standard" and "art", with an echo of the German word for banner or flag, Standarte. A keen drummer, he was a member and co founder, with Frank Wollny, of the free jazz group Triple Trip Touch (aka T. T. T. or TTT) and had the opportunity to play with some of the best Jazz musicians of the late 1980s, including Butch Morris, Frank Wright, Billy Bang, Louis Moholo and Frank Lowe. He organized events at his country mansion in Heimbach involving installations by Lennie Lee, performances by Anna Homler and paintings by Christine Kuhn, in 1990. He also wrote poems, essays and theoretical texts.

1968: Deutsche Avantgarde 3: A. R. Penck, Bilder, Galerie Hake, Köln. 1968: A. R. Penck: Erstes Training mit Standart, Galerie Michael Werner, Köln. 1972: Documenta 5, Fridericianum, Kassel. 1977: Documenta 6, Fridericianum, Kassel. 1982: Documenta 7, Fridericianum, Kassel. 1984: Venice Biennale, Venice. 1992: Documenta 9, Fridericianum, Kassel.

The most expensive painting by Penck in the art market was Welt des Adlers I (World of the Eagle I) (1981) who sold by $687.201 at Sotheby's London, on 11 February 2020.

A. R. Penck is represented in many public collections, like the Kunstsammlung Deutsche Bundesbank, in Frankfurt am Main, the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt am Main, the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, in Duisburg, the Kunsthalle, in Hamburg, the Galerie Neue Meister, in Dresden, the Kunstmuseum Walter, in Augsburg, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, in Bonn, the Ludwig Museum, in Cologne, the Kunstpalais Erlangen, in Erlangen, the Pinakothek der Moderne, in Munich, the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, in Zürich, the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Strasbourg, the Hugh Lane Gallery, in Dublin, the Berardo Collection Museum, in Lisbon, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D. C., the Art Institute of Chicago and the Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece.