This fall,
Ketabi Bourdet Gallery in Paris presents a daring and unexpected encounter: “
PENCK / STARCK,” staged in collaboration with
Vincent Fraikin. The exhibition juxtaposes the ceramic works of German artist
A.R. Penck shown for the first time in France with rare furniture and design pieces by
Philippe Starck, many of which have never before been exhibited on the market. Together, they form a conversation between two icons of the 1980s and 1990s whose radical spirits, though never intertwined in life, converge powerfully in the gallery space.
A.R. Penck’s Unknown Ceramics
Known primarily as a leading figure of European Neo-Expressionism, A.R. Penck (1939–2017) left an indelible mark on painting, sculpture, and drawing. His pictorial language of schematic figures, pictograms, and signs became synonymous with a visual shorthand for human experience and socio-political systems. Yet, as the exhibition makes clear, his work in ceramics has remained an overlooked chapter one that proves essential to understanding the scope of his practice. The origins of this body of work lie in Amsterdam at the gallery Aschenbac , where Penck first experimented with painting onto ceramic surfaces. Bu it was in Berlin, between 1988 and 1998, in the studio of his friend and collaborator Kattrin Kühn, that this practice truly expanded. Kühn shaped the raw forms bowls, eggs, pyramids, platters, or even egg cups according to Penck’s direction. He would then treat each piece as a blank canvas, layering his system of signs onto three-dimensional objects.
These works extend Penck’s pictorial universe into the tactile and sculptural. The signs do not simply decorate but inhabit the form, pushing the object beyond its utility or decoration into a conceptual field. Each ceramic becomes both sculpture and fragment of his broader “models of systems” a worldview in which painting, drawing, and object-making interlace. In their physicality, the ceramics transform Penck’s visual language into manipulable, intimate forms, underscoring the artist’s capacity for radical freedom.
Philippe Starck’s Radical Objects
If Penck’s ceramics embody the translation of signs into volume, Philippe Starck’s designs assert the power of form itself as provocation. The French designer, whose prolific career has spanned furniture, interiors, architecture, and product design, emerged in the 1980s as a voice of playful radicality. His creations are never merely functional; they question, unsettle, and often carry an irreverent charge. The exhibition assembles a rare constellation of Starck’s designs from the same period as Penck’s ceramics. At its heart is an ensemble of objects from Mystique, a Tokyo café conceived by Starck in 1988 and shuttered in 1998. When the café closed, most of its furnishings were destroyed, with only a handful of pieces rescued by employees. Now, for the first time, these objects resurface on the market and in the gallery.
Among them are the seating designs Miss Milch (1987) and Phil Lizner (1987), created exclusively for the Japanese market. These radical silhouettes structure the exhibition space, their presence as commanding as sculpture. Starck’s Howard library (1987), austere yet striking, serves as a display for Penck’s painted plates, each like a miniature canvas against its dark backdrop. Tables designed by Starck including the Titos Apostos (1985) and Lang (1988) models become supports for Penck’s ceramics, blurring distinctions between design and fine art, pedestal and artwork. Finally, the lamp Soudain le sol trembla (1981), hovering between functional lighting and sculpture, adds a domestic counterpoint, echoing Penck’s own negotiation between object and art.
Although Penck and Starck never crossed paths, their pairing feels startlingly natural. Both pursued practices that resisted confinement: Penck, fleeing the restrictions of East Germany, forged a pictorial system that defied ideology and embraced universality; Starck, conversely, fully embraced the media-saturated society of late 20th-century capitalism, turning design into both spectacle and critique.
Placed together, their works resonate in their insistence that objects cannot be reduced to utility or decoration. A ceramic bowl by Penck and a chair by Starck both operate as vehicles of thought, as provocations. Each inhabits the double life of being an object one might use and an object that resists being used, insisting instead on contemplation. The staging at Ketabi Bourdet amplifies this dialogue. Penck’s painted ceramics rest upon Starck’s radical furniture, establishing a visual and conceptual layering. The gallery space becomes less an exhibition than an environment, an experimental terrain where two creative minds of the same generation meet in absentia.
Beyond the specific contributions of Penck and Starck, the exhibition evokes a broader spirit of the 1980s and 1990s in Europe. It was a time of seismic cultural shifts: the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the rise of global consumerism, and the transformation of visual culture under mass media. Both Penck and Starck navigated these currents in distinct yet complementary ways. Penck’s pictograms offered an almost archaic universal language at a moment when political borders and ideologies were collapsing. Starck’s designs, meanwhile, embraced global circulation, leveraging the glamour of design to critique its very commodification. In their radical freedom, they both rejected passivity, insisting that art and design alike must challenge perception. By uniting these two figures, Ketabi Bourdet proposes not just an art historical rediscovery but a contemporary reflection. In a time when the boundaries between art and design are increasingly porous, the exhibition demonstrates how such crossings are not only possible but also generative. Penck’s ceramics, long overlooked, emerge here not as curiosities but as essential extensions of his oeuvre. Starck’s radical designs, meanwhile, shed their familiarity to appear once again as startling propositions.
Ultimately, “PENCK / STARCK” stages more than a meeting of objects; it orchestrates a meeting of minds, of two radical thinkers separated by geography but united in spirit. In the gallery’s rooms, ceramics and furniture, pictograms and forms, speak across decades with urgency and wit.
