A.R. Penck was a German Neo-Expressionist. Born Ralf Winkler, the artist adopted his pseudonym after reading the work of the geologist Albrecht Penck. A.R. Penck lived in East Berlin from 1963 to ’72. Though often associated with the graffiti-based work of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, his style emerged independently as a response to the censorship of the German Democratic Republic. Penck’s work is unique for its primitivistic stick-figures and signs, and his paintings employ a schematic idiom to convey universal ideas that are not tied down to a particular ideology of national agenda. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.
