A.R. Penck (Ralf Winkler)

Mul, Bul Dang & Sentimentality, Abstract Woodblock by A.R. Penck

1988

Ralf Winkler, alias A. R. Penck, Mike Hammer, T. M., Mickey Spilane, Theodor Marx, "a. Y." or just "Y" (1939 – 2017) was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor and jazz drummer. Penck was born in Dresden, Germany. In his early teens he took painting and drawing lessons with Jurgen Bottcher, known by the pseudonym Strawalde, and joined with him to form the renegade artists’ group Erste Phalanx Nedserd (“Dresden” spelled backward). He later worked for a year as a trainee draftsman at the state advertising agency in Dresden. After failing to gain admission to the fine-arts academies in Dresden and East Berlin, Penck worked for several years as a stoker, a newspaper deliverer, a margarine packer and a night watchman. After emigrating to West Germany in 1980, Penck became one of the foremost exponents of new figuration, alongside Jorg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lupertz. Their work was shown by major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. 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. Penck first attracted attention with a series of paintings and sculptures, made in the 1960s and early 1970s, that he called Standarts, a conflation of "standard" and "art", with an echo of the German word for banner or flag, Standarte. 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 City. A keen drummer, he was a member and with Frank Wollny co-founder of the free jazz group Triple Trip Touch (aka T.T.T. or TTT) and took every opportunity to play with some of the best Jazz musicians of the late 1980s including Butch Morris, Frank Wright, Billy Bang, Louis Moholo and Frank Lowe, organising events at his country mansion in Heimbach in 1990 involving installations by Lennie Lee, performances by Anna Homler and paintings by Christine Kuhn.