GERMAN
Penck, A.R. (Ralf
Winkler)
born: 1939 Dresden
dead: 2.5.2017 Zürich
To A. R. Penck's mind, pictures are part of a cybernetic system. As he once
stated, "Signals control behavior. Signals trigger urges or inhibit them,
signals cause excitement roduce the body's overall physical tone. Existence,
development, success, decay - all are controlled through signals." Based
on suth considerations, Penck produced several large-format paintings in the
mid-ig6os in which diagrammatic depictions akin to prehistoric art were used
to visualize possible cybernetic models and systems. "What I envisage,"
Penck wrote to Georg Baselitz, "is a kind of physics of human society, or,
say, society as a physical body." His Large World Picture of 1965 has
long been considered a key work in Penck's oeuvre. As Armin Zweite notes, the
picture deals with "communication processes in their simplest form, and
the hier- archical principles of order underlying a primitive social community."
Penck has explored every conceivable situation in the relationship between
individual and society, simulating these in cardboard models of impressive
force. In the early 1970s, searching for solutions to aesthetic problems by
reducing them to the elementary categories of perception and thought, he began
working in a serial and conceptual manner. Yet his primary concern continued
to be not with eliminating the ego from the artistic process, but with
analyzing its position within a systematic artistic process. What Penck tested
in his World Picture bore fruit in his work of around 197o, even though the
means were now less "romantic." Yet the symbolic idiom of his early
work, recalling Paul Klee or the Art Brut artists, remained a constant, the
figure reduced to simple linear configurations and accompanied by attributes
defining the context continuing to dominate even the large formats. Penck's
art hovers on the borderline between figure and concept. It finds poetic
metaphors for dilemmas confronting the individual in modern society, but
without forgetting that the individual is in incessant and ubiquitous jeopardy.