Composition avec roue, 1990

Description

original lighography, edition e. a. (artist copy), signed in graphite, glazed / framed

Already in 1961 Penck turned away from realistic painting. Like Picasso, he had worked intensively with ethnological and archaeological works and developed from it his cipher system of elementary character figures reminiscent of anarchic cave images.

As a “master of the stick figures”, Penck cultivated this kind of painting long before popart and graffiti artist Keith Haring popularized them worldwide.

The fascination with the world of archeology even went so far that he changed his name. Born as Ralf Winklter he called himself from the mid-sixties “A.R. Penck” after the ice age researcher and geologist Albrecht Penck.

Penck is one of the most important contemporary German artists. He is assigned to the neo-expressionists or new savages, which include Georg Baselitz, Elvira Bach, Jörg Immendorff or Markus Lüpertz. His works can be found in the most important collections in the world, from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, to name only a few.