A.R. Penck

The Artist

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Encapsulating A.R. Penck’s complex idiom of symbols and cyphers, the portfolio Expedition to the Holy Land is representative for the German artist’s celebrated oeuvre. As a guest of the prominent collector and publisher Joshua Gessel, Penck visited Israel and its occupied territories in January 1983. After an extensive tour of Isreal and its borders, Penck spent a period of four weeks working on a portfolio of prints at the Burston Graphic Centre in Isreal, to offer an artistic resumé and comment on his experiences and impressions of the tour.

Expedition to the Holy Land is a portfolio that comprises of 15 prints, produced in various techniques that allowed Penck to approach the experience of his visit in different ways. For example, the colour lithographs focus on the landscape structures he experienced, whereas the black and white lithographs where his reactions to sculptures he had seen during his visit. With the colour screenprints, Penck explored Isreal’s political situation and he made use of monochromatic drypoint and aquatint for his abstract figurative compositions and symbolic imagery.

‘Every action on the plate somehow corresponds to a motif in reality. Whether it is executed powerfully or more sensitively and with restraint, the actual graphic work corresponds to my own experience' (A.R. Penck cited in Siegfried Gohr, ‘A.R. Penck: Expedition to the Holy Land ...', Flash Art, no.114 Nov. 1983, p.56).

Furthermore, Penck produced each print in a deliberate rectangular format, as he stated:

'These rectangles have appeared in my work since 1977. The beginning was very strange. There were photographs of my first big show abroad in Bern in 1975, that were distorted because they had been shot using a wide-angle lens and the squares had become rectangles. Suddenly I noticed that a whole new tension entered the work. ... I imagined something like a travel prospectus ... landscapes are wide. The images are more or less presentations of events, my impressions of Israel, and so I found the wide format quite suitable.' (A.R. Penck cited in Siegfried Gohr, ‘A.R. Penck: Expedition to the Holy Land ...', Flash Art, no.114 Nov. 1983, pp.56-7).

The portfolio was first shown at an exhibition titled A. R. Penck Expedition to the Holyland at the Tel Aviv Museum in March-May 1983. Other editions of the portfolio have been exhibited worldwide and can be found in the collections of the Tate Modern in London and The Minneapolis Institute of Art, to name a few.