Publisher's Synopsis
Ralf Winckler, better known under the name A.R. Penck (1939-2017), is one of the greatest German artists of the late twentieth century (along with Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, Sigmar Polke and Jörg Immendorff).The exhibition at the Fondation Maeght, chooses another point of view. It's focus is on the challenges of his painting and sculpture through different periods chosen to give a better understanding of the richness of his aesthetic, existential, philosophical and literary worlds. It presents one hundred paintings, sculptures, large sets of drawings, prints and Penck's artists' books.Penck invented a colourful pictorial language expressing the rhythm of a constant back and forth between primitivism and 'art brut', between painting and graffitism of which he is one of the fathers along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.His language aims to be the language of this humanity that he is trying to portray, by using calligraphic elements, through themes such as the relationship to the animal or cosmic world, or a dialogue between catastrophe and the jubilation of dance.The posthumous exhibition (and this beautiful, extensive accompanying catalogue) attempts to explain that the of A.R. Penck who, through painting, sculpture and drawing, shows the adventure of an artist who perceives his work as "the promise of space" - a space to discover, to explore, to inhabit.Published on the occasion of the exhibition, A.R. Penck: Rites de passage at Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul, France, (March 18 - June 18, 2017).
