A. R. Penck valuation
Painted stick figures as a private code in East Germany, under a name that was not his.
A. R. Penck was born Ralf Winkler in Dresden in 1939 and took the pseudonym from a geologist of the ice ages, partly to protect himself: he was repeatedly refused entry to art school in East Germany, was expelled from the artists' union, and was under Stasi surveillance for years while smuggling work to a West German dealer.
What a work by A. R. Penck is worth
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Bio
A. R. Penck was born Ralf Winkler in Dresden in 1939 and took the pseudonym from a geologist of the ice ages, partly to protect himself: he was repeatedly refused entry to art school in East Germany, was expelled from the artists' union, and was under Stasi surveillance for years while smuggling work to a West German dealer. The paintings use a deliberately primitive vocabulary of stick figures, arrows, crosses and signs, which he called Standart — a system meant to work as a universal code, and also to be deniable. He was expatriated in 1980, taught in Dusseldorf and died in 2017.
The East German works made before 1980 are the historically important part of the output and are scarce, since materials were short and pictures were smuggled out; they were often painted on bedsheets, packing card and whatever was available, which creates real condition and support problems. The much larger post-1980 output forms the bulk of the market. Penck also made bronze sculpture, a very large body of works on paper, and a substantial printed output. Signature is usually a monogram; dating frequently requires the archive.
At a glance
- Born
- 5 October 1939, Dresden
- Died
- 2 May 2017, Zurich
- Movement
- Neo-Expressionism
Strawalde, Documenta and Dublin
As a teenager Winkler took lessons with Jürgen Böttcher, known as Strawalde, and with him formed the group Erste Phalanx Nedserd, Dresden spelled backwards. He took the name A. R. Penck in 1966 and later also used Mike Hammer and TM. He showed at Documenta 5 in 1972, and was kept out of Documenta 6 in 1977 through the influence of a Stasi informant.
He moved to West Germany on 3 August 1980, living first at Kerpen near Cologne, and was shown again at Documenta 7 and IX. A keen drummer, he co-founded the free jazz group Triple Trip Touch. After retiring he moved to Dublin in 2003, and he died in Zurich in May 2017.
Lücke, Immendorff and the Düsseldorf chair
In May 1971 Penck founded the Dresden group Lücke with Steffen Terk, Wolfgang Opitz and Harald Gallasch, and in 1975 the Academy of Arts in West Berlin gave him its Will Grohmann Prize, after which the Stasi watched him more closely. From 1976 he worked with the West German painter Jörg Immendorff on pictures calling for an end to the border between the two Germanys and in support of the dissidents Rudolf Bahro and Robert Havemann. Some works from these years are signed simply Y, and in May 1979 a break-in at his studio destroyed works and papers.
Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne showed him as early as 1968, in Erstes Training mit Standart. After he left the East he had solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1981 and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1988, showed at the Venice Biennale in 1984, and in 1988 became professor of painting at the Düsseldorf academy, where Yoshitomo Nara was among his students. He painted a BMW Z1 as an Art Car in 1991, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York holds about a hundred of his prints and unique works.
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