It is hard to believe that one of the most famous German artists of the last decades, the neo-expressionist A. R. Penck (actually Ralf Winkler), was rejected by the art academies in East Berlin and Dresden a couple of times. However, training to be a commercial artist and private evening courses should suffice to unfold his artistic talents.
The oeuvre of A. R. Penck gets its high recognition value through the roughly jotted stick-figures, which are somewhere between a pre-historic reduced symbolism, graffiti and calligraphy. He thus created archetypal image worlds that strikingly address the sensitivities of post-modernist man. The schematic "Weltbilder" and "Standartbilder" from the 1960s were continued by A. R. Penck to large compositions with accents in strong colors; in sculpting A. R. Penck also brought his imagery to full effect.
Renowned international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hamburg Kunsthalle or the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam show works by A. R. Penck. The Artist died in Zurich in 2017.