Ralf Winkler

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Ralf Winkler, alias A.R. Penck, born in 1939 in East Germany, influential, prolific Jewish, Painter and Printmaker. He studied together with a group of neo-expressionist painters in Dresden. The foremost exponents of the new figuration alongside AR Penck were Jorg Immendorff, Georg Basilitz, Markus Lupertz. Hodicke. Under the communist regime, they were watched by the secret police and were considered dissidents. In the late 1970's they were included in shows in West Berlin and were seen as exponents of free speech in the East. Their work was shown by major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980's. They were included in a number of important shows including the famous Zeitgeist exhibition in the well-known Martin Gropius Bau museum and the important New Art show at the Tate in 1983.

In the 1980s he became known worldwide for paintings with pictographic, neo-primitivist imagery of human figures and other totemic forms. He was included in many important shows both in London and New York but was somewhat over-shadowed by the work of Keith Haring, whose work bore a superficial resemblance to Penck's, particularly after Haring's early death from AIDS in the late 1980s.

Penck's sculptures, though less familiar, evoke the same primitive themes as his paintings and drawings and use common everyday materials such as wood, bottles, cardboard boxes, tin cans, masking tape, tinfoil, wire and are crudely painted and assembled. Despite the anti-art aesthetic the rough and ready quality of their construction, they have the same symbolic, archetypal anthropomorphic forms as his flat symbolic paintings. The paintings are influenced by Paul Klee's work and mix the flatness of Egyptian or Mayan writing with the crudity of the late black paintings by Jackson Pollock. The sculptures are reminiscent of the stone heads of Easter Island and other prehistoric Oceanic art.

A keen drummer, he was a member of rock group "Triple Trip Touch" and took every opportunity to play with some of the best Jazz musicians of the late 1980s including Butch Morris, organising events at his country mansion in Heimbach in 1990 involving installations by Lennie Lee, performances by Anna Homler and paintings by Christine Kuhn

A.R. Penck lives and works in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Dublin und New York.

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