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Lot Essay
Executed in 1982, two years after A. R. Penck made the pivotal move from East to West Germany, Puck Telefoniert mit Michael is a large-scale work dating from a triumphant moment in his career. Stretching two metres in width, it most likely depicts Marie-Puck Broodthaers – the daughter of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers – on the telephone to Penck’s gallerist Michael Werner. Werner had mounted Penck’s first solo exhibition in 1968, and had long championed his career from the other side of the Berlin Wall. Marie-Puck was Werner’s assistant, and the two featured in a number of other works by Penck during the early 1980s, most notably the 1984 painting Dinner at Brown’s Hotel (Tate, London). The choice of subject matter reflects an exciting and busy period in the artist’s professional life, during which – freed from the oppressive regime of the GDR – his work achieved international recognition. In 1981, he was granted his first museum retrospective in Cologne, and featured in the landmark exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London: the first institution outside Germany to show his work. The following year, he was invited to participate in the legendary Zeitgeist exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, as well as Documenta 7, and made his debut in America. Alongside artists such as Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff and Markus Lüpertz, he took his place at the forefront of movements such as Neo-Expressionism and ‘New Figuration’. Having been removed from the workings of the Western art world for most of his career, Penck now found himself at its centre.
Born Ralf Winkler, Penck adopted a variety of pseudonyms throughout his career, ultimately favouring a moniker derived from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century geologist Albrecht Penck. Operating in East Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, he developed a system of symbols and stick figures that he termed ‘Standart’. After his expulsion from the GDR, following a devastating raid on his studio, he continued to develop elements of this language – evident in the present work’s bold, rudimentary lines– whilst simultaneously expanding his artistic horizons. Though Penck had previously worked in relative cultural isolation, with little knowledge of contemporary artistic developments, many drew parallels between his work and that of artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Such comparisons are certainly pertinent to the present painting’s rich gestural brushwork and totemic, pseudo-mythological creatures. The figure of Marie-Puck, on the other hand, might be said to recall the reclining women of Pablo Picasso – long admired by Penck – or Henri Matisse. More generally, the work’s whimsical composition and ambitious scale reflects the artist’s newfound liberation during this period: with wider access to materials and pigments, writes Ingrid Pfeiffer, ‘his works were altogether more colourful, more luminous, more playful’ (I. Pfeiffer, ‘A Known Unknown – How A. R. Penck Is Seen Today’, in A. R. Penck Retrospektive, exh. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2007, p. 47).
Born Ralf Winkler, Penck adopted a variety of pseudonyms throughout his career, ultimately favouring a moniker derived from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century geologist Albrecht Penck. Operating in East Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, he developed a system of symbols and stick figures that he termed ‘Standart’. After his expulsion from the GDR, following a devastating raid on his studio, he continued to develop elements of this language – evident in the present work’s bold, rudimentary lines– whilst simultaneously expanding his artistic horizons. Though Penck had previously worked in relative cultural isolation, with little knowledge of contemporary artistic developments, many drew parallels between his work and that of artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Such comparisons are certainly pertinent to the present painting’s rich gestural brushwork and totemic, pseudo-mythological creatures. The figure of Marie-Puck, on the other hand, might be said to recall the reclining women of Pablo Picasso – long admired by Penck – or Henri Matisse. More generally, the work’s whimsical composition and ambitious scale reflects the artist’s newfound liberation during this period: with wider access to materials and pigments, writes Ingrid Pfeiffer, ‘his works were altogether more colourful, more luminous, more playful’ (I. Pfeiffer, ‘A Known Unknown – How A. R. Penck Is Seen Today’, in A. R. Penck Retrospektive, exh. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2007, p. 47).