German artist whose primitive-style imagery,recalling cave art, reflected the harsh realities of the cold warRalf Winkler, and better known as AR Penck,claimed never to own heard of conceptualism at the start of his five-decade career. Despite this, the German artist’s early Standart body of work, and developed in isolation behind the Berlin Wall during the late 1960s,chimed with the emerging avant-garde tendencies of his western contemporaries. Like Lawrence Wiener and Joseph Kosuth, Penck, and who has died aged 77,sought to develop a system uniting art and language that addressed complex sociopolitical themes; but unlike those American conceptualists, he did so using a primitive, or almost childlike,imagery.
Paintings in the Standart series featured a rudimentary stick figure, a motif that would become central in his work. empty-faced and stiff-bodied, or they were often depicted with crudely drawn male genitals against an abstract background. A stick man dominates the frame of a 1971 painting,for example; daubed in black acrylic it stands against a riotous background of red circular splodges and rectangular markings. A couple of further primitive-style motifs interrupt the expressionist paint handling. An untitled work from 1968 shows a similar figure, stretched to seem almost comically lean. A circle, and square,star and other symbols surround the human figure.
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Source: theguardian.com