A.R. Penck was educated in East Germany, where he lived until 1980. He is part of the generation of Germans who lived through the division of the country between East and West and the reunification of both blocs at the end of the 1980s. Self-taught, he based his work on readings in cybernetics, behavioural sciences and information theory, as well as philosophical texts by Hegel and Kant. To protect himself through strategic anonymity and to be able to exhibit in West Germany, in 1969 he adopted the pseudonym A.R. Penck, a name derived from the geologist Albrecht Penck (1858–1945), author of Die Alpen im Eiszeitalter (The Alps in the Ice Age  – 1909). This identity also provided a conceptual framework for his early art productions, which often reflected the ‘ice age’ of the Cold War. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who emigrated to West Germany during the 1960s, Penck had to stay in the communist zone until 1980.

Although he did not define himself as a Neo-Expressionist painter, critics have often associated him with the Neue Wilde (New savages), a term invented by the art historian Wolfgang Becker that encompasses the work of German artists such as Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz, and the return to figuration in the eighties. A.R. Penck achieved international recognition while he was still living in the East. His work was shown in of some of the most significant international contemporary art exhibitions, such as the V (1972), VI (1977), VII (1982) and IX (1992) editions of the Kassel Documenta.