Ralf Winkler a.k.a. A.R. Penck (1939-2017) was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor, and jazz drummer. Training at the academies of the GDR or membership in the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR remain A.R. Penck refused, although he applied several times for it. And although his art, which oscillates between abstraction and figuration, does not correspond to the aesthetic ideal of socialist realism, he shares the cultural-political view of the role of the artist as a socially relevant force. Again and again Penck deals with the actually existing socialism and rubs against its contradictions. In the mid-1960s, Georg Baselitz sold Winkler's works to the gallery owner Michael Werner, who organized his first solo exhibition in Cologne in 1968.—Artnet