The Rebellious Painting of A.R. Penck If you haven't seen the MACBA Collection yet, now is the time

After the immateriality of Conceptualism and the coldness of Minimalism, by the 1980s certain artists had returned to figuration, with a renewed vigour typical of Neo-Expressionism. In different geopolitical contexts, artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, A.R. Penck, Miquel Barceló and Ferran Garcia Sevilla proclaimed the power of the gesture and the radical nature of protest. If you have not yet visited the MACBA Collection, come and experience the forcefulness of the work of A.R. Penck, the painter, sculptor and percussionist born in East Germany who hid behind a pseudonym so he could exhibit outside his country without being persecuted. Ralf Winkler took the name of the German geologist Albrecht Penck, author of the book Die Alpen im Eiszeitalter (The Alps in the Ice Age, 1909). Besides being a strategy of anonymity, it was also a way of making clear that his artistic production was foremost a critique of the ‘ice age’ of the Cold War. Testimony of a time, his painting captures the capacity of the human condition for rebellion.