Thoughts That Cure Radically: A.R. Penck in New York City

A.R. Penck ‘Before the West: Selected Works from the 1970s’ Leo Koenig Inc.

A.R. Penck ‘New Paintings’ Michael Werner Gallery

New York’s fascination with German painting is satiated in two simultaneous exhibitions of A.R. Penck’s artwork. The first exhibition, ‘Before the West: Selected Works from the 1970s’ at Leon Koenig Inc. displays paintings, sculptures and collages Penck produced and smuggled out of East Germany, while uptown his more recent acrylic paintings are on view at Michael Werner Gallery. Together, these two exhibitions helps us understand an artist who used painting as a form of subversion in two Germanys, the first Communist and the second in a reunified Capitalist society.

Currently based in Dublin, London, Düsseldorf and Cologne, A.R. Penck is a pseudonym for Ralf Winkler. Originally born in Dresden, Germany, in 1939, A.R. Penck is a name Winkler drafted from Albrecht Penck, a 20^th Century geologist whose specialty was the distant geological period now known as the Ice Age. Unable to exhibit his artwork in the German Democratic Republic, Penck, starting in 1969, smuggled his artwork out of East Germany for exhibition with Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. This period of underground, dissident artwork from the 1970s makes up the exhibition at Leo Koenig Inc. During this period Penck began to create his striped down, crude language of stick figures and forms that remains his dominant visual trope in the work on view at Werner. At Koenig, Penck’s 70s work mixes various painterly media, including oil, acrylic and dispersion that also begins to incorporate collage and sculpture made from cardboard and photographic imagery. Distantly reminiscent of late period Picasso, Penck’s paintings from the 70s can also be read as proletariat dirges using the totemic mystical language of Adolf Gottlieb and Richard Pousette-Dart. Simple and direct, Penck’s paintings at Koenig and Werner do not make a fuss of their intentions or execution. Penck’s Stuktur from 1974 is an example of his pictogram like construction, wherein he uses only black and white to make a shallow pictorial field depicting faces, shields, fauna, eyeballs and symbols. At Werner his Dreigeteiltes Problem (Tripartite Problem) from 2011 does not greatly depart from this language, adding color and a slight texture to a kinesthetic pictorial field. Further, his Vorstoß (Advance) from 2010 bears a resemblance, apart from the cleaned up painterly approach, to Russisches Bild from 1973 in its lazily geometric forms and dispersed compositional structure.

Penck’s visual consistency holds at bay, through its humorous and unvaried insistence on form, mark and depiction, the restrictions Western ideology has placed on them—albeit socialist or capitalist. Penck’s paintings first denigrated the grey narrowness of communist Germany using limited but direct paint application. Now, two decades after the collapse of the socialist experiment in the west, Penck subverts the polychromatic constrictions of 21^st Century capitalism using jazzed up color but a no less equally direct confrontational approach.