Untitled
A.R. Penck (Ralf Winkler)
German, 1939–2017
1983
A drypoint print in which A.R. Penck fills the plate with crude, pictographic figures and quick, carved lines, aiming to invent a communal visual language of signs and gestures.
You'd first be struck by the all-over frenzy of sticklike humans, animal heads, arrows and boxes — jittery, repeated marks that read like graffiti or a modern cave painting, punctuated by a frantic central scrawl.
Penck’s etched sign-fields helped advance a postwar pictorial vocabulary that mixes primitivism, graffiti and diagram to question how meaning and communication are formed under social and political strain.
Medium
Drypoint
Dimensions
plate: 15 9/16 x 23 1/8" (39.5 x 58.8 cm); sheet: 25 1/4 x 29 3/4" (64.1 x 75.5 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Elinor and Edmund Grasheim (through the Associates of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books)
Accession
331.1986
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
