Berlin - Julius Werner Berlin presents A.R. Penck “The Eighties”, on view through March 27, 2008. Penck comes from a clime which has elapsed. He lives in a present which will not start before the next corner. Certainly he is an European artist. Definetely he is not anymore just a denizen of Dresden.

Derry, Dublin, Edinburgh: a triangle in which interlocution and encounter go round in circles and turn into a casus belli. Two capitals where everything is calm: Dublin. Edinburgh. One area of civil war: Derry. The Scots against the irish. Since a long time now the subject is not a certain colloquy but it is about ever recurring senseless situations. Penck moves towards this conflict in 1887 when he moved to Ireland. These paintings show clearly that he opened his eyes widely to this not only comfortable panorama.

All of Penck's  paintings as well as his sculptures display the power of soliloquy and self-encounter and their hovering through totems and taboos out of a human, historical geology.

The paintings remaining from our present maybe only such which would have been understood a twenty thousand years ago? Penck's paintings - not only the ones from the Eighties - are a plea of painting in a culture of oblivion.
 
Ralf Winkler, alias A.R. Penck (born 5 October 1939) is a German painter, printmaker and sculptor.
He was born in Dresden, East Germany, and studied together with a group of other neo-expressionist painters in Dresden. He became one of the foremost exponents of the new figuration alongside Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Under the communist regime, they were watched by the secret police and were considered dissidents. In the late 1970s they were included in shows in West Berlin and were seen as exponents of free speech in the East. Their work was shown by major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. They were included in a number of important shows including the famous Zeitgeist exhibition in the well-known Martin Gropius Bau museum and the important New Art show at the Tate in 1983.

In the 1980s he became known worldwide for paintings with pictographic, neo-primitivist imagery of human figures and other totemic forms. He was included in many important shows both in London and New York.