|
(*1939, Dresden, Germany), Realname Ralf
Winkler
To A. R. Penck's mind, pictures are part of a cybernetic system. As he
once stated, "Signals control behavior. Signals trigger urges or inhibit
them, signals cause excitement roduce the body's overall physical tone.
Existence, development, success, decay - all are controlled through signals."
Based on suth considerations, Penck produced several large-format paintings
in the mid-ig6os in which diagrammatic depictions akin to prehistoric
art were used to visualize possible cybernetic models and systems. "What
I envisage," Penck wrote to Georg Baselitz, "is a kind of physics of human
society, or, say, society as a physical body." His Large World Picture
of 1965 has long been considered a key work in Penck's oeuvre. As Armin
Zweite notes, the picture deals with "communication processes in their
simplest form, and the hier- archical principles of order underlying a
primitive social community." Penck has explored every conceivable situation
in the relationship between individual and society, simulating these in
cardboard models of impressive force. In the early 1970s, searching for
solutions to aesthetic problems by reducing them to the elementary categories
of perception and thought, he began working in a serial and conceptual
manner. Yet his primary concern continued to be not with eliminating the
ego from the artistic process, but with analyzing its position within
a systematic artistic process. What Penck tested in his World Picture
bore fruit in his work of around 1970, even though the means were now
less "romantic." Yet the symbolic idiom of his early work, recalling Paul
Klee or the Art Brut artists, remained a constant, the figure reduced
to simple linear configurations and accompanied by attributes defining
the context continuing to dominate even the large formats. Penck's art
hovers on the borderline between figure and concept. It finds poetic metaphors
for dilemmas confronting the individual in modern society, but without
forgetting that the individual is in incessant and ubiquitous jeopardy.
Taken from German section of 'Artistgroup'
www.kuenstlergruppe.de
|
