A.R. Penck - Early Works : Michael Werner Gallery, New York, NY

Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of early works by German artist A.R. Penck. Featuring important paintings and sculptures created in Dresden in the 1960s and early 1970s, the exhibition presents unique insights into the artist’s distinctive style and sensibility. This is the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States of Penck’s rarely seen early works in over two decades.

A.R. Penck’s mature style, characterized by brusquely painted signs and symbols rendered with an intense graphic impact, is by now recognizable to anyone familiar with the art that emerged in Europe during the post-war period. Penck’s reductive pictorial vocabulary and determinedly unfussy painterly style have made it all too easy for unsympathetic viewers to dismiss the artist as primitive or neo-expressionist. The exhibition at Michael Werner, focused entirely on important early paintings and the artist’s first sculptures, seeks to redress this by highlighting the surprising formal and conceptual origins of Penck’s oeuvre.