Word: penck
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...Schonebeck, who abruptly gave up painting at the age of 30, in 1966. There is also a powerful group of sculptures by Beuys. But the artists who get the most play are those industrial-scale bores of the international art market, Baselitz, with his upside-down figures, and A.R. Penck, with his dull pseudoprimitive graffiti, along with such earnest but relatively plodding talents as K.H. Hodicke and Markus Lupertz...
...Historian Jack Cowart, who assembled it, wisely refrained from trying to cover everyone. Instead, he chose five "exemplary" figures, the most influential and (although his catalogue essay waffles on this point) the aesthetically superior ones: Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz and A.R. Penck...
...Penck, 43, is a lesser painter and sculptor than Baselitz, but he is a more curious figure. Credit where credit is due: his huge early pictographs like Standard, 1971, have an undeniable, simple power, even a degree of mystery. One realizes where a New York graffiti artist like the fulsomely promoted Keith Haring, 25-the Peter Max of the subways-filched his ideas, a decade later. Penck's paintings consist of stick figures and linear signs, enacting parodies of myth, ritual and archaic language. They draw on a wide range of sources, from algebra to Dipylon vases, from...
...Penck's obsessive loquacity and mock-ritual imagery are apt to cause inflation. "He is like the North Pole," rhapsodizes Curator Cowart, "that place which attracts the navigational magnetic compass from afar but repels and disorients it when approached." The more modest truth, for those with unwiggled needles, is that Penck's imagery is often so obscure that he seems to feel no special responsibility to the system he deploys. A lot of the paintings are mumbo jumbo, and their formal attributes can be remarkably trite-cliché figure-ground reversals, careless scrawly drawing...
...best of the Germans is probably A.R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler), who was on show at the Sonnabend Gallery. An East German emigre to the West, he does mock-archaeological images blown up to "American" size. On a flat ground, flat pictographs: Ariadne holding her thread, Theseus as a stick figure with spear, a Minotaur. This primitivism is meant to suggest a heroic Aegean prehistory, a lost age when sibyls muttered in every cleft, and any scratch or spiral meant something. But Penck's images are mere quotation suffused with graphic charm; they are little more than the husks...