Literature

An apparently nocturnal scenario unites archaic beings and symbols in this work: predatory cat and eagle, sun and moon, people hunting or performing ritual dances. The exploration and visualisation of ancient and contemporary, natural and political-sociological contexts has been the focus of A.R. Penck’s artistic creation since the 1960s. The artist, born as Ralf Winkler, adopted this pseudonym in 1968, inspired by the empiric research of a German Geographer and Ice Age researcher. “In the same way as the natural scientist Albrecht Penck, who searched for information on the history of the earth and a chronology of the Ice Age in the rock layers and sediment deposits [...], Ralf Winkler worked his way through many layers of information, through the entire history of art. As a cultural Ice Age researcher and based on Marxist thinking, he aimed to analyse social forces and structures. ‘What I have in mind is a sort of physics of human society.” (Eckhart Gillen, Schwierigkeiten beim Suchen der Wahrheit, Heidelberg 2002, p.386).