Horse Racing

'Horse racing' is one of the first pictures Penck painted after he moved from West Germany to London. It is an excellent example of his spontaneous painting style. His brushstrokes are immediate and impulsive, almost as though he were afraid he couldn't paint fast enough to get his thoughts down on canvas. The colours are mostly unmixed, with a conscious emphasis on the primaries: red, yellow and blue. The proportions of the signs and figures are ignored in favour of an overall composition, which, in turn, appears to follow the laws of chance rather than any deliberate principle of construction.
In discussing the reasons behind his move to London after living in West Germany for several years, Penck stated: "The first thing I noticed when I arrived in the West was that I had exchanged one state of disruption for another: I had moved from schizophrenia eastern-style to schizophrenia western-style. But it didn't produce any deep changes in me... In West Germany the past was always haunting me, the business of mourning isn't over. And that got on my nerves. I was seeking a more relaxed way of life, so I hit on the idea of the Nordic world, a world that had always interested me. England and Ireland are the islands with the most mysterious relics of a distant cultural past." (In: 'A.R. Penck', Basel 1989, unpaged.)