A.R. Penck (1939–2017) - Constructiv

A.R. Penck
Constructiv, 1991
Material: multi-color screen print on handmade paper
Edition: 100
Dimensions: 84.1 x 59.4 cm
front-signed by hand and numbered
Edition: 100 + XX
The work is offered unframed.
excellent condition

"His famous stick figures are not trademarks for the sake of quick recognizability, but archaic symbols of coming together." That is what the taz wrote in 2017 in its obituary for A. R. Penck. And the Süddeutsche Zeitung made clear on the occasion of his death that "stick figures" may have been a stencil-like simplification of the life project of an exceptional artist. Penck's drawings were "not phone doodles," but "thousands of utopias, in writing and image," said his artist friend Georg Baselitz in 2017 in an interview with the Berlin auction house Grisebach. Baselitz and Penck – then still Ralf Winkler – first met in West Berlin in 1961. "He invents his own alphabet, drawing from the depths of history and art, yet completely his own." The sun, a ladder, a staircase, the infinity sign, filled with the primary colors red and green – the picture stories Penck conceived bubble with life while maintaining a high degree of abstraction, with the figure never banished from the image. The artist did not refuse; he had in mind the revolutionizing of society, without ever submitting to a system or an idea. His confidently tossed narratives reach beyond him—and we as viewers cannot help but spin them onward in our own, very personal ways.