The artist was born as Ralf Winkler in Dresden in 1939. Penck witnessed the bombing of Dresden as a little boy in 1945. Penck would later state, that what he saw of the destruction of the city would become his strongest childhood memory. He started his training in Jürgen Böttcher’s drawing class in Dresden at the age of fourteen. Soon an artist group named Erste Phalanx Nedserd developed around Böttcher, consisting of Penck and his classmates. Not adhering to a particular style, the group was united by a central vision: to create art without compromise. By following this vision, his work became more and more abstract. Penck inevitably moved away from the officially accepted art of state-sponsored socialist realism and became deeply involved with the emerging underground art-scene of the DDR.
In the 1960s Penck became interested in the field of cybernetics and information sciences. Merging philosophical and cybernetic systems theories into his art, Penck created what he termed his Standart theory. The term being a conflation of “standard” and “art”, with an echo of the German word for banner or flag, “Standarte”. It was a conceptual practice that aimed at creating a universal system or language of art through symbols, to be understood by all viewers. His paintings became two-dimensional, forgoing perspective. A stick figure, as representation of “every man”, or bigger groups of stick figures began to populate his paintings and become a motif of his sculptures. Using simple and archaic pictorial symbols like arrows, crosses, wheels and circles, but also mathematical symbols, traffic signs or trademarks, he developed his singular style. His Weltbilder and Systembilder emerged, in which he visualized the division of Germany and a world divided between socialism and capitalism. Even though encouraged by his friend Georg Baselitz, who already lived in West Germany, Penck decided not to leave the DDR. Throughout the 1960s, Penck saw his problematic relationship to the East German state as temporary, always hoping that he would be accepted as an artist. Ultimately authorities denied him any access to the official artist’s network, thus forcing him to work without further training, outside of academia and inhibiting public exhibition of his work.
In 1965, Penck’s friend Baselitz introduced him to gallerist Michael Werner, who staged Penck’s first exhibition in the West in 1968, with paintings smuggled over the border. In an effort to keep his activities in the West covert, the artist took up the pseudonym A. R. Penck. Adopting the name of Ice Age researcher Albrecht Penck (1858–1945), Penck referred to his conception of art “as empirical science in the age of the Cold War”. This first exhibition Michael Werner organised at Galerie Hake in Cologne was Penck’s entrance onto the international art scene. Throughout the 1970s, he had many solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums across Europe and Canada. His work was included in numerous international showcases of contemporary art before he emigrated to the West in 1980.
Through his large-scale gestural paintings and his unique symbolism, A. R. Penck became strongly associated with the Neo-Expressionist movement and its representatives, like Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz.He lived first outside Cologne, then in London, Killala (Ireland), Düsseldorf - where he taught as a professor at the Art Academy in 1988 and Dublin, often dividing his time between different locations. A.R. Penck’s prolific artistic output was driven primarily by his desire to create a universal artistic language that addresses the issues facing modern man. He was also a poet and writer, and a musician who co-founded the free jazz group Triple Trip Touch, in which he mostly played the drums.
A.R. Penck’s first solo museum exhibition was organised in 1971 at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld. The following year he participated in documenta 5 (and contributed works to three subsequent documentas). He became an important figure in iconic exhibitions of the 1980s, such as A New Spirit in Painting (Royal Academy, London, 1981), Westkunst (Kölner Messehallen, Cologne, 1981) and Zeitgeist (Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin, 1982). In 1984 he represented West Germany at the 41st Venice Biennale, together with Lothar Baumgarten. Retrospectives of A.R. Penck’s work were held at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1988, before travelling to Kunsthaus Zurich, and at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2007, Kunsthalle zu Kiel and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2017 the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, dedicated a major exhibition to the artist’s diverse works from different periods. Today, A.R. Penck is represented in collections worldwide, ranging from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden to the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.