‘The serial approach is particularly suitable for researching elusive phenomena.’ –A. R. Penck

Gestural, visceral and tactile, across the highly animated surface in Rock I, A. R. Penck articulates his singular, graphic mode of mark-making. Conceived in the same year that Penck participated in the Venice Biennale, the German artist was influenced by graffiti and cave paintings – sources that had also informed the comparable glyphs of both Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Born in Dresden in 1939 as Ralf Winkler, Penck’s formative years were marred with tragedy, facing the heavy bombing of his hometown at the tender age of six. A stoic autodidact, during adolescence Penck refused to conform to the Socialist Realist aesthetic enforced by the Communist regime in East Germany, eventually defecting to the West in 1980. Working outside of the establishment with no formal training, among the various pseudonyms adopted by the artist to confuse officials, the alias ‘A.R. Penck’ would endure. In the face of these social and political structures, Penck’s dense, distinct pictorial systems powerfully engage with modernity, prehistory, the individual, the society and his role within it.