.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 2001, A. R. Penck’s Sehnsucht (Longing) thrums with a vibrant, arresting energy. Two bright blue figures stretch across the life-sized canvas, their limbs swaying in dance. Inked in black are the artist’s iconic stick-figures: arms raised upwards and bodies crowned with triangular visages. Amongst these forms float diamonds, crosses, bars and boxes, a rhythmic swelling of black and blue. Rendered with graphic, energetic strokes, the German neo-Expressionist conjures a lively scene against a stark white backdrop.
Born Ralf Winkler in 1939, Penck studied and worked in his home city of Dresden, until moving to East Berlin in 1963. It was there that he adopted Penck, one of several ‘paint names’, and, alongside George Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff and Markus Lüpertz, became a key player in Germany’s new figuration movement of the 1970s. Taking inspiration from cave paintings and hieroglyphs, Penck proposed a new idiom for communication combining text, image and symbol which he named Standart. The rudimentary stickman he first developed in the early 1960s would become its central motif. Relying on simple outlines and geometric patterning, Penck’s Standart compositions explore a universal communication: as the artist himself said, ‘Every Standart can be imitated and reproduced and can thus become the property of every individual. What we have here is a true democratisation of art’ (A. R. Penck quoted in O. Basciano, ‘AR Penck Obituary’, The Guardian, 5 May 2017). Such a philosophy suffuses Sehnsucht, and the vivacious figures of the painting embody Penck’s Standart ethos: independent, wild, uninhibited, free.
Born Ralf Winkler in 1939, Penck studied and worked in his home city of Dresden, until moving to East Berlin in 1963. It was there that he adopted Penck, one of several ‘paint names’, and, alongside George Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff and Markus Lüpertz, became a key player in Germany’s new figuration movement of the 1970s. Taking inspiration from cave paintings and hieroglyphs, Penck proposed a new idiom for communication combining text, image and symbol which he named Standart. The rudimentary stickman he first developed in the early 1960s would become its central motif. Relying on simple outlines and geometric patterning, Penck’s Standart compositions explore a universal communication: as the artist himself said, ‘Every Standart can be imitated and reproduced and can thus become the property of every individual. What we have here is a true democratisation of art’ (A. R. Penck quoted in O. Basciano, ‘AR Penck Obituary’, The Guardian, 5 May 2017). Such a philosophy suffuses Sehnsucht, and the vivacious figures of the painting embody Penck’s Standart ethos: independent, wild, uninhibited, free.