Ralf Winkler

"A. R. R. PENCK", RALF WINKLER (Dresden, Germany; 1939- Switzerland, 2017).
"Ohne titel," 1986.
Silkscreen. Copy 49/53.
Presents on the back label belonging to the gallery Lelong Paris.
Signed and justified in pencil.
Measurements: 88 x 124 cm; 97 x 133 cm (frame).
Ralf Winkler, who also used the pseudonyms Mike Hammer, T.M., Mickey Spilane, Theodor Marx, "a. Y." or simply "Y" was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor and jazz drummer. Penck was born in Dresden, during his teenage years he began attending painting and drawing classes with Jürgen Böttcher, known by the pseudonym Strawalde, and joined him to form the renegade artists' group Erste Phalanx Nedserd, notable because its members refused to study at an academy. Members of the group were also denied acceptance into the GDR Association of Visual Artists. Therefore, they had to earn a living as laborers or craftsmen. Later he worked for a year as a trainee draughtsman at the state advertising agency in Dresden. From 1955 to 1956, Winkler was a draftsman at the advertising agency DEWAG and from 1956, he tried to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and the Berlin University of the Arts in East Berlin, but it was not until 1966, when Winkler became a candidate to join the Association of Fine Artists, now under the artistic pseudonym A. R. Penck. Which was elected after the geologist Albrecht Penck. From 1969 he had more and more problems with the GDR Ministry of State Security. His paintings were confiscated and his acceptance into the GDR Association of Visual Artists (VBK) was rejected.Winkler was one of the founding members, in May 1971, together with Steffen Terk, Wolfgang Opitz and Harald Gallasch, of the artists' group GAP, which existed until 1976. Since 1973 he worked under the pseudonyms Mike Hammer and TM. After serving in the military service in 1974, he was awarded the Will Grohmann Prize in 1975 by the West Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1976, Penck met West German painter Jörg Immendorff, with whom he would collaborate in the following years. In their work they campaigned for the abolition of the German internal border, and for dissidents, among them Rudolf Bahro and Robert Havemann. From 1976, he also signed simply Y. In 1977, some of his paintings were confiscated. In May 1979, several of his works and records were destroyed during a break-in at his studio. On August 3, 1980, he was transferred to West Germany. After emigrating, Penck became one of the leading exponents of the new figuration, along with Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Their work was shown by major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. They were included in several important shows, such as the famous Zeitgeist exhibition at the famous Martin Gropius Bau museum and the important New Art exhibition at the Tate in 1983. He first lived in Kerpen, southwest of Cologne. In 1981, the Goethe Foundation awarded him the Rembrandt Prize in Basel, Switzerland. In 1983, Winkler moved to London and received the Aachen Art Prize in 1985. In 1988 he participated in the exhibition Made in Cologne, in the same year he was appointed professor of painting at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf.
In his paintings can be seen, worlds and spaces of experience, full of symbolic abbreviations. He used stick figures and graphic icons that seem reminiscent of cave paintings, Asian calligraphy and graffiti art. In the 1960s and 1970s, he created a series of paintings and sculptures, which he called Standarts, a combination of "standard" and "art," echoing the German word for banner or flag, Standarte.By this term, Penck understood an art form that used simple, archaic pictorial symbols, such as road signs or trademarks. In the 1980s.