Lot 15 D

With their simplified, seemingly timeless canon of forms, the sculptural works by Penck that were created as from 1984 are reminiscent of prehistoric or African-Oceanic cult objects – a source of inspiration for numerous modern and contemporary artists. By his own admission, however, Penck was not particularly interested in these so-called primitive cultures; he named the abstract-organic sculptures of artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Hans Arp as models.
As from the late 1960s, Penck used a vocabulary of pictorial signs and abbreviations in his painterly work, which he calls “Standart” and which was intended to transpose his underlying statements in a generally understandable and contemporary way. This principle can also be found in the reduced formal language of his sculptural works. He used bronze casting as an additional means of unifying and objectifying his works, which were originally composed of wood, cork, polystyrene, cardboard, or objets trouvés. An intense personal and intellectual engagement with political-social contexts underlies both his sculptural and painterly works. “Part of Penck’s sculptural concept is to consider a sculpture not only from a purely pictorial point of view, in its three-dimensionality and its dependence on the surrounding space. He is interested in investigating which sculptural problems can arise from political, social, or biographical themes and conceptual ideas.” (Christine Lutz, in: A.R. Penck - Erinnerung, Modell, Denkmal, Heilbronn 1999, p.14f.)