A.R. Penck - Museo d'arte Mendrisio

When: October 24, 2021 - February 13, 2022
this event is ended

Place: Museo d’arte Mendrisio
Region: Svizzera

Until February 13, 2022, the Mendrisio Museum of Art is hosting a large retrospective dedicated to the German master A.R. PENCK.

Penck is certainly among the most important German artists of the second half of the twentieth century, the one who, together with other painters and companions - Baselitz, Lüpertz, Polke, Richter, Immendorff and Kiefer - was able to express the contradictions of post-Nazi Germany and the conflict East-West through a very original language although conceived in traditional expressive forms, such as painting, drawing and sculpture.

The Mendrisio retrospective curated by Simone Soldini, Ulf Jensen and Barbara Paltenghi Malacrida - including over 40 large-format paintings, 20 sculptures in bronze, cardboard and felt, over fifty works on paper and artist's books - intends to retrace the main stages of his creative path.

Born in Dresden, Penck has been active in East Germany for decades with works of clear socialist inspiration. Much opposed, he rarely exhibits in the then GDR. It is only since the beginning of the seventies that Penck manages to participate in exhibitions in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada, gaining wide acclaim. In 1972 he exhibited at Documenta 5 in Kassel called by Szeemann; at the beginning of the eighties he is among the protagonists of the New Spirit in painting (London) and Zeitgeist (Berlin) exhibitions.

In 1980, when, after yet another conflict with the authorities, he emigrated to the West, A.R. Penck is now considered one of the protagonists of the world painting scene and has already aroused great interest in New York. Basquiat and Haring admire him for his vigorous monumental painting, capable of delineating the complexity of the world with the spontaneity and immediacy of a graffiti artist.... read the rest of the article»

In 1984 he was celebrated with a personal exhibition at the Venice Biennale; in 1988 the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin definitively consecrates him with a major retrospective. The foundations of his monumental painting date back to the end of the 1960s, with the birth of the Standart project. As a sort of monumental avatar, Standart symbolizes the artist's self-awareness, with which Penck carries out his solitary project, in line with the ideas of the Bauhaus: the transformation of modern society according to aesthetic criteria.

Thanks to the famous stylized figure of him, which leads him to international fame, Penck has been able to transform the figurative field into a megaphone through which to spread his theoretical and aesthetic beliefs. His monumental painting of him is linked both to the historical genre, mirror of contemporary events, and to symbolic painting, to which he gives voice through an entire bestiary of totemic figures or archaic animals. Until his production of maturity, A.R. Penck pursues the idea of a visionary image capable of representing the chorality of the world in a single perspective.

Penck is also one of the protagonists of sculpture of the last thirty years. He has been involved in sculpture since his youth, and his first plastic group is made up of models made with poor materials as part of the Standart project; in the mid-seventies he made wood sculptures with an ax. Starting from 1984 he concentrated on the bronze casting technique, working on different formats up to reach the monumental dimension, with a similar path to that already followed in painting. One of his great bronze works will be placed in the cloister of the Museum.

With this project, the Mendrisio Art Museum aims to present Penck's creative path - for the first time in the Italian-speaking cultural sphere - through its multiform expressions, trying to provide the public with the tools to be able to understand the structure. complex and profound of this great contemporary delirious protagonist.

Title: A.R. Penck - Museo d'arte Mendrisio

Opening: October 24, 2021

Ending: February 13, 2022

Organization: Museo d’arte Mendrisio

Curator: Simone Soldini, Ulf Jensen e Barbara Paltenghi Malacrida

Place: Museo d’arte Mendrisio

Address: Piazzetta dei Serviti 1 - 6850 Mendrisio (Svizzera)

Timetables:
Tue-Fri: 10.00 - 12.00 / 14.00 - 17.00 Sat-Sun and holidays: 10.00 - 18.00 Monday closed, except holidays. Closed 24/25 December 2021 and 1 January 2022

Entrance:
Full chf / euro 12.- reduced chf / euro 10.-

Monograph Catalog of 300 p. with color illustrations of all the works on display, for sale at chf / euro 38.-

Guided tours and educational activities:
Free educational activities for kindergarten, elementary school and middle school pupils. Guided tours for high schools: chf / euro 60.- Guided group tours on request with an art historian guide chf 100 .- / euro 90.-

More info on this website: https://museo.mendrisio.ch/