(Dresden 1939–2017 Zurich)
Kreislauf der Spiele (Cycle of Games), 2005, signed, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 180 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galleria San Carlo, Milan (certificate available)
Galerie Michael Schultz, Berlin (certificate available)
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Galleria San Carlo, A. R. Penck, March 2006, exh. cat. pp. 38 – 39 with ill.

In the works of the early 2000s, this human presence was further incorporated into the universe of signs deployed by Penck. This is the case, for example, in Kreislauf der Spiele. In this piece, the foreground depicts the circular movement of two large fish, while the figures with human features are relegated to the edges.
Even more so than previously, the works of this period probe questions of precarity and uncertainty through a pictorial system that reaches the viewer’s perception with both directness and ease, only later entering their rational mind: “Penck’s aesthetics proposes itself as an account, a diary, a genuine writing in ideograms that conjugates forms and makes them become words, sounds, obsessions to be deposited in intimate human depths, in the memory”.
L. Caprile, A. R. Penck. L’uomo e il suo labirinto esistenziale, 2006

Penck recounts this through an alphabet of signs that reveals a compositional harmony, despite being devoid of any aestheticising complacency. Its harmony can be linked to the harmony found in music, and, to some extent, it finds an ideal counterpoint in the artist’s passion for ‘free jazz’, a genre that gives ample space to improvisation and spontaneity.

In particular, it is the German Expressionists, from Grosz to Dix to Beckmann, with whom he shares his strong dynamism: Penck’s figures are always accompanied by a dense series of contours that creep into the spaces unoccupied by the main story to accompany it as it evolves, representing a world outside of any particular place or time.

From a chromatic point of view, his symbols oscillate between a bright and violent colourism and an absolute two-tone black and white palette. They explore the personal sensitivity of both the spectator and the artist, who creates and draws the path of his characters without defining their boundaries in terms of perspective, but rather gradually discovering the next step, the next encounter. However, although it is not forced within predetermined limits, the human figure in Penck’s works “seems to move relentlessly within itself in search of an outlet that is not so much physical as mental. As a result, it often returns to its steps, to its problems, to the knots of life that are repeated daily as questions to which it is difficult to give a convincing, reassuring, persuasive answer, first of all for one’s own conscience”.

L. Caprile, A. R. Penck. L’uomo e il suo labirinto esistenziale, 2006