German artist A.R. Penck (b. 1939) is part of the generation of post war German artist such as George Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. Early in his career he adopted Penck as a pseudonym to protect him self, while being an artist i East Germany. Penck is selftaught and makes paintings and sculptures. In the 1980s he became known worldwide for paintings with pictographic, neo-primitivist imagery of human figures and other totemic forms. The lexicon of primitive motives employed throughout his paintings is a conflation of the ancient and modern world: the sources of his symbols, words and images range from the palaeolithic period to the Cold War and strife in the Middle East.
