A.R. PENCK
17 SEPTEMBER –17 DECEMBER 1989
From the press release, 1989: The first solo exhibition in Scandinavia features 15 sculptures by the German artist A. R. Penck. Penck was born in Dresden in 1939, where he lived under the name of Ralf Winkler until 1980, when he was granted an exit visa. Through his contact with Michael Werner in Cologne, Penck gained international recognition in 1965, more than 15 years before he was able to leave East Germany.
Penck has worked under a number of pseudonyms (T M, Mike Hammer, Alpha Ypsilon, all of which stand for the concepts on which he bases his work. "A. R. Penck" - from the geologist Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) - primarily represents information. The artist sees an analogy between the geologist's study of rock strata and his own examination of the "layers of information in art history".
CONTENTS:
A.R. Penck by Donald Kuspit
Exhibition catalogue no 4.
36 pages, color, soft cover. Texts in Swedish/English.
Published 1989 by Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall.
Price: 150 SEK (approx. 16 EUR)
A.R. Penck by Donald Kuspit
"Totem, fetish, and taboo remain effective ideas in the West since Freud, and still have a certain influence on life and ideas".
A. R. Penck
A. R. Penck's sculptures are primitivist in method and meaning. They have the elemental, charged look that only the raw, irregular, crudely carved surface-sometimes incorporating a found object, such as the machine part of "XRFKTKFR". 1986- can generate; and the deep emotional import of the totemic and fetishistic. While the majority of the works are of upright figures, "gefiederte Schlange", 1985 also has totemic and fetishistic implications. As is well known, the totemic figure can take the form of an animal. I will argue that "Standart-Modell Antiatomkraft Grün-Grün-Grün", 1987 is the paradoxical climax of Penck's obsession with the totemic, all the more so in that the work lacks the form and iconography of the totem. It is essentially a cluster of frag-ments, with the same immediacy as stones in a Zen garden, but symbolically implying the disintegration of the whole rather than its reintegration, as in the garden. Penck's fragments are annihilative rather than reparative in import.
To regard Penck's sculptures simply as neo-primitivist -as yet another eighties postmodernist revival art - is to misunderstand them badly. It is to give them a superficial, cursory reading. They undoubtedly have affinities with early 20th century primitivist art, especially the primitivism of German Expres-sionism in its heyday. But that primitivism tends to be optimistic and elated; Penck's primitivism has a melancholy, pessimistic cast. Penck's frozen male figures- their bronzing confirms their immobilized, passive condition -are far from Kirchner's fluid, dynamic female figures, both carved and painted. They have more to do with the iron totemic hermes figure in Beuy's "Tram Stop", 1977 than with Kirchner's wooden "Nude Woman, Sitting with Her Legs Crossed (on a piece of tree trunk)", 1912. Early German primitivism was largely psychosexual -pansexual -in import. It idealized figures into a timeless pastoral/paradisiac vividness antithetical to the vulgar, hard urban world in which the work was made. The figures symbolized sexual liberation; they were biophiliac antidotes to - imagistic amulets against - the anxious sexuality of the artists and the pedestrian bourgeois world. Penck's late 20th century Expressionistic primitivism is not without psychosexual implications, as his acknowledgement of the Freudian meaning of totem and fetish indicates, but his figures have more to do with the self. The apparent sexual meaning of his figures masks their narcissistic meaning.
Excerpt from the catalogue text by Donald Kuspit, 1989.
Works in the exhibition
"Kopf W.", 1987.
Bronze painted red, 68 x 23 x 23 cm
"GTGM", 1986.
Bronze, 134 x 12 x 12 cm
"X-face-man", 1987.
Bronze, 90 x 16 x 9 cm
"Petra", 1987.
Bronze, 62 x 19 x 9 cm
"Frauenkopf", 1988.
Bronze, 98 x 22 x 20 cm
"Standart-Modell-Antiatomkraft-Grün-Grün-Grün", 1987.
Bronze, 33 x 87 x 61 cm
"X(T)", 1985.
Bronze, 135 x 10 x 10 cm
"Gefiederte Schlange", 1985.
Bronze, 31 x 5 x 63 cm
"XRFKTKFR", 1986.
Bronze, 246 x 18 x 18 cm
"Mi-Cla-Ma (middle classman)", 1986.
Bronze, 245 x 11 x 8 cm
"Als", 1987.
Bronze, 56 x 10 x 5 cm
"Ilei", 1987.
Bronze, 55 x 10 x 5 cm
"Waffe", 1987.
Bronze, 198 x 12 x 8 cm
"Zen-Trum", 1987.
Bronze, 116 x 26 x 26 cm
"Ascot", 1987.
Bronze, 106 x 17 x 17 cm
Installation view Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
Photo: Lennart Durehed |
"Kopf W.", 1987
Photos: Jochen Littkemann |
"Standart-Modell-Antiatomkraft-Grün-Grün-Grün", 1987
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"Zen-Trum", 1987
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"Frauenkopf", 1988
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A.R Penck
Photo: Benjamin Katz |
