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拍品专文
A large-scale work from one of A. R. Penck’s most important creative periods, Untitled, 1971, is situated at a critical moment in the artist’s career. Living under the oppressive regime of the Eastern Bloc, and banned from exhibiting, Penck’s efforts to promote his work in Western Germany came to a head in 1971 with his first solo museum show. Held at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, the exhibition paved the way for his participation in the infamous Documenta 5 the following year, pushing his work onto an international stage. Emanating from this breakthrough period, Untitled, with its central stick figure and cryptic conglomeration of symbols, displays many of the tropes for which Penck’s work was to become best known. Painted only one year after the publication of his seminal treatise Was ist Standart? (What is Standart?), which consolidated Penck’s ongoing vision for a new democratic artistic language, Untitled bears witness to the growth and development of unique pictorial style.
Penck’s well-documented fascination with theoretical physics, cybernetics and information theory led him to meditate on the possibility that a universal language of symbols might be able to transcend the political system to which he was subordinated until his emigration in 1980. As Untitled evinces, it was a language that afforded Penck a great deal of compositional and technical scope. Executed with intuitive, fluent brushstrokes in black, white and red, Penck’s visual characters range from the mathematical to the primitive. His favoured infinity symbol, turned on its side, sits to the right of an ebullient swathe of complex gestural scrawl; the stick-figure’s right leg is shadowed by a form that invokes musical notation – another of Penck’s interests – whilst the letter ‘T’ sits above a downward cascade of strokes resembling free writing. Poised somewhere between a classroom blackboard and a graffitied wall, Untitled reveals Penck’s ability to weave together disparate signifiers into a work that burgeons with a sense of delight in its own wide-ranging referential compass.
Penck’s well-documented fascination with theoretical physics, cybernetics and information theory led him to meditate on the possibility that a universal language of symbols might be able to transcend the political system to which he was subordinated until his emigration in 1980. As Untitled evinces, it was a language that afforded Penck a great deal of compositional and technical scope. Executed with intuitive, fluent brushstrokes in black, white and red, Penck’s visual characters range from the mathematical to the primitive. His favoured infinity symbol, turned on its side, sits to the right of an ebullient swathe of complex gestural scrawl; the stick-figure’s right leg is shadowed by a form that invokes musical notation – another of Penck’s interests – whilst the letter ‘T’ sits above a downward cascade of strokes resembling free writing. Poised somewhere between a classroom blackboard and a graffitied wall, Untitled reveals Penck’s ability to weave together disparate signifiers into a work that burgeons with a sense of delight in its own wide-ranging referential compass.