1. A.R. Penck's Work Sees Global Demand and Record-Breaking Prices
In May of this year, Christie’s sold a 1981 work by A.R. Penck for $567,000 during the New York sales cycle, the second highest price ever achieved for the artist’s work. This sale is significant because it marks a shift in demand for Penck's work, which has historically been concentrated in Europe. The artist, born Ralf Winkler in pre-World War II Germany, grew up in Dresden under Communist rule and emigrated to West Germany in 1980. Never formally trained, Penck is known for his Expressionist paintings and has been associated with other post-war European expressionist painters.
Looking at Penck’s public sales since 1986, we can see a long history of fluctuating demand and prices. In 1989, the artist saw nearly $1 million in total auction sales and average prices of over $82,000 for his paintings, but this peak was short-lived. It wasn't until the rise of the Contemporary art market in the mid-2000s and a major exhibition of Penck's work at the Fondation Maeght in 2017 that his market showed renewed growth. From 2017 to 2021, auction volumes for Penck's paintings rose significantly, reaching a record of $3.7 million in 2020. Average prices also increased, reaching a high of $138,071 in 2020 before climbing even further to $250,360 in 2022.
The strong sales of Penck's work in recent years, including the record-breaking sale in New York, suggest that the artist is gaining a broader base of collectors beyond Europe and may be poised to follow in the footsteps of his peer Georg Baselitz, who has also seen a global expansion of his market. These developments indicate that Penck's market and cultural currency may be shifting on a global scale.
2. Who is A.R. Penck?
A.R. Penck was a German Neo-Expressionist artist who is best known for his paintings and sculptures featuring simplified figures and forms, as well as neo-primitive symbols and patterns. Born Ralf Winkler in 1939 in Dresden, Penck attempted to gain entry into an art school in the former German Democratic Republic but was unsuccessful. As a result, he decided to pursue art independently in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, Penck was unable to publicly exhibit his work in East Germany, so he smuggled his creations out to West Berlin and Switzerland, where they were exhibited regularly. In 1980, he emigrated to the West and lived in London, Dublin, and Dusseldorf before eventually settling in Zurich, Switzerland, where he died in 2017.
Penck is known for his interest in developing a pictorial language based on a simple system of signs that could be easily decoded by anyone. This led to a radical reduction in form to a series of outlined stick figures, which he called "Standart," in reference to the signals associated with commonly known standard symbols. His work often sought to abstract complex, socio-economic situations into flat, pictorial compositions infused with symbolism, and was driven by apparent chaos and emotion rather than any system or rational narrative.
Throughout his career, Penck participated in several major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale and Documenta 5, 6, 7, and 9. He also had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Kunsthalle Bern, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul, France, and the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai, among others. His work is held in the permanent collections of major international institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Neue Nationalgalerie SMPK in Berlin, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
3. Canadian Ministers Collaborate on Copyright Law Reform to Benefit Artists on Resale of Works.
Canadian innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne and heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez are working on a reform to the country's copyright laws that would allow artists to receive a portion of the proceeds when their work is resold. The change is intended to benefit Canada's approximately 21,000 artists, many of whom live below the poverty line, including Inuit artists who often miss out on such profits because they sell their work in remote areas. The reform has been led by Senator Patricia Bovey, the first art historian to be elected to the Canadian Senate, and supported by the Canadian nonprofit CARFAC, which represents visual artists in the country. CARFAC is currently advocating for Canadian artists to receive 5% of a work's value on resale, and for their estates to receive such proceeds after their death. Currently, 90 countries worldwide have copyright protections in place that allow for resale royalties to be distributed to artists. While the United States is not one of these countries, some NFT sales have included "smart contracts" with embedded resale royalties for the automatic distribution of proceeds to artists.