01 June 2020 till 27 September 2020

A.R. Penck

A.R. Penck, How it Works, 1989, acrylic paint on canvas, 340 x 340 cm, Galerie Michael Werner.

A.R. Penck (1939-2017) was one of the German artists who, after the Second World War, paved the way for a new artistic mindset. Today he is known above all for his Streichholzmännchen (‘matchstick men’): figures with limbs resembling rakes, generally surrounded by pictograms, numbers and letters. Penck’s crudely rendered visual idiom reflects his distaste for cultural and political systems, but there is also an inquiring and intuitive aspect to it. His work will be explored in an extraordinary retrospective featuring almost two hundred works, including paintings and drawings that have rarely been shown.