A.R. Penck (Dresden, Germany 1939 – Zurich, Switzerland, 2017)

In 1953/54, he took lessons from the painter Jürgen Böttcher, then began an apprenticeship as a draughtsman at DEWAG in 1955/56 and attended evening classes at the Dresden Art Academy in 1956/57. In 1960, after an intensive study of philosophy, he found his way to conceptual painting. His extreme condensation of pictorial means into elementary, analytical signs is modelled on cave painting, children's drawings and the late work of Paul Klee. On paper and canvas, Penck's seemingly archaic "elementary sign figures" often tell stories of the most personal kind, without ever being exclusively biographical in origin.

In 1976, he became friends with the artist Jörg Immendorff and worked intensively with him. He finally moved to West Germany in 1980. A few years later he moved to London and then settled in Dublin in 1987.

A.R. Penck was represented at the documenta several times between the 1970s and 1990s and took part in the Venice Biennale in 1984. From 1988 to 2005, he was a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Penck received the Goethe Foundation's Rembrandt Prize in 1980 and the Aachen Art Prize in 1985. His most recent solo exhibitions included the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2010 and the famous foundation of the American collector Andrew Hall in 2012.

His paintings can be found in the important collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

He died in Zurich in 2017.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Group