NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Werner Gallery, New York presents The Temple of Many Faces, an exhibition of self-portraits by one of the most important artists of post-war Germany, A.R. Penck (b. 1939 in Dresden, d. 2017 in Zürich).


Explore the enigmatic world of A.R. Penck! Delve into the art and life of this influential German artist through insightful biographies and critical analyses. Discover his unique visual language and the stories behind his captivating works.


Self-portraiture was an integral part of A.R. Penck’s artistic development during his life in the German Democratic Republic. Born Ralf Winkler, A.R. Penck shifted between pseudonyms to elude East German authorities who continually surveilled and harassed him. Unable to exist as his true self, self-portraiture was a way of affirming his individuality and identity as an artist.

Penck’s work developed separately from the West, learning about the history and contemporary developments of Western art through books and reproductions. He was greatly inspired by Rembrandt, who famously painted over 100 self-portraits during his lifetime, and by Picasso, whose artistic developments can be charted through his self-portraits. Penck was also inspired by his famous post-war contemporary in the United States, Andy Warhol, who mythicizes himself, becoming the subject of his own work. Penck’s work developed with the keen awareness that self-portraiture has a deep, rich history in Germany, having been invented by Albrecht Dürer in 1500.

The paintings in The Temple of Many Faces were made after 1980, the year Penck emigrated to the West. Crisscrossing the Western Hemisphere and at the height of his international fame, Penck viewed himself as a “tourist” and visual researcher. By this time, identity was an entrenched, core topic in his work. Art critic John Yau writes: “One of the thematic threads running throughout Penck’s art is identity, a concept that taps the deepest currents of his life. His highly considered response speaks to an issue his generation had to face: that of being a German artist who had to establish an identity despite having been separated from the past and much of his country. This is not to suggest that Penck is a regional artist or even simply a German artist. His identity is much broader, for his imaginative art effectively addresses alienation, solitude, and isolation, which have become integral parts of modern life.”

Two decades of Penck’s paintings, from 1982 to 2002, are on view in The Temple of Many Faces. The exhibition shows that the self-portrait was a natural, instinctive artform for the artist to explore and assert his identity as an autonomous East German artist of international stature and importance in the 20th century.

While in the GDR, A.R. Penck received the help of Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, and Michael Werner, who smuggled his work westward where they caused a sensation. A.R. Penck’s first solo museum exhibition occurred in 1971 at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld. The following year he participated in Documenta 5 (he contributed major works to three subsequent presentations of Documenta). He was awarded the prestigious Will Grohmann Prize of the Academy of Arts in West Berlin in 1975. He participated in the groundbreaking exhibitions Zeitgeist (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 1982) and New Art (Tate, London, 1983). Overall, his career spanned more than five decades. Numerous solo exhibitions worldwide include Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Tate Gallery, London; Kunsthaus, Zürich; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Kunstmuseum den Haag. A.R. Penck died in Zürich in 2017.

The Temple of Many Faces opens to the public on Wednesday 26 February 2025 and will remain on view through Saturday 3 May 2025. A full-color catalogue with text by Nils Emmerichs and an interview between Penck and himself titled Where Time is Headed will accompany the exhibition.



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