A.R. Penck Lot n° 15

A.R. Penck NRMN 1986 Bronze with brown-green patina 136 x 12 x 12 cm. On wooden base 15.5 x 20 x 20 cm. On the plinth with the signature stamp "ar penck", the foundry stamp "SCHMÄKE DÜSSELDORF", the gallery stamp "GMW" and numbering. Copy 5/6. Heilbronn Municipal Museums (ed.), A.R. Penck, Memory, Model, Monument, Heidelberg 1999, WVZ no.PB 86/1 (RPP 51). Provenance Michael Werner Kunsthandel, Cologne (2017); private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia. With their simplified, seemingly timeless canon of forms, Penck's sculptural works, created since 1984, are reminiscent of prehistoric or African-Oceanic cult objects - a source of inspiration for numerous modern and contemporary artists. According to his own statement, however, Penck is hardly interested in these so-called primitive cultures; he names the abstract-organic sculptures of artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Hans Arp as models. Since the late 1960s, Penck has used a vocabulary of pictorial signs and abbreviations in his painterly work, which he calls "Standart" and which is intended to translate his underlying statements in a generally understandable and contemporary manner. This principle is also found in the reduced formal language of his sculptural works. He additionally uses bronze casting as a means of unifying and objectifying his works, which were originally composed of wood, cork, Styrofoam, cardboard, or found objects. Underlying both his sculptural and painterly works is an intense personal and intellectual engagement with political-social contexts. "Part of Penck's sculptural concept is to consider a sculpture not only from a purely pictorial point of view, in its three-dimensionality and its dependence on the surrounding space. He is interested in examining what sculptural problematics political, social, or biographical themes and conceptual ideas can have." (Christine Lutz, in: A.R. Penck - Memory, Model, Monument, Heilbronn 1999, p.14f.)