"A. R. PENCK"; RALF WINKLER (Dresden, Germany; 1939- Switzerland, 2017)."Olympia".Mixed media on

"A. R. PENCK"; RALF WINKLER (Dresden, Germany; 1939- Switzerland, 2017).
"Olympia".
Mixed media on paper.
Signed in the lower left corner.
A. R. Penck originally created this work to form part of one of the 10 advertising posters painted by artists representing the Barcelona brand during the 1992 Olympics. However, it was censored by the Barcelona 92 Olympic Organising Committee, which considered it inappropriate due to its high degree of eroticism. It is therefore an unpublished work that represents a small part of the cultural legacy that the Olympics gave us.
Size: 70 x 50 cm; 85 x 65 cm (frame).
The controversy aroused by the work that we now present to the Barcelona 92 Olympic Organising Committee was due to its highly erotic nature. The fact that Penck depicted a young lady like Olympia, with her breasts exposed (multiplied by 5, each corresponding to an Olympic ring) or with two naked pubes, was reason enough to censure the work as inappropriate. It was not the first time that an Olympia had aroused controversy in art: when Édouard Manet presented his work of the same name at the Paris Salon in 1865, it was branded pornographic owing to its high degree of eroticism, causing a great stir among the critics of the time. It is striking how, despite the time difference of almost 130 years between the two works, history is repeating itself.
Ralf Winkler, who also used the pseudonyms Mike Hammer, T.M., Mickey Spilane, Theodor Marx, "a. Y." or simply "Y" was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor and jazz drummer. Penck was born in Dresden, during his teenage years he began attending painting and drawing classes with Jürgen Böttcher, known by the pseudonym Strawalde, and joined him to form the renegade artists' group Erste Phalanx Nedserd, notable for its members' refusal to study at an academy. Members of the group were also denied acceptance into the GDR Association of Visual Artists. They therefore had to earn their living as labourers or craftsmen. Later he worked for a year as a trainee draughtsman at the state advertising agency in Dresden. From 1955 to 1956, Winkler was a draughtsman at the advertising agency DEWAG and from 1956, he tried to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and the Berlin University of the Arts in East Berlin, but it was not until 1966, when Winkler became a candidate to join the Association of Fine Artists, now under the artistic pseudonym A. R. Penck. Which was elected after the geologist Albrecht Penck. From 1969 onwards he had more and more problems with the GDR Ministry of State Security. His paintings were confiscated and his acceptance into the GDR Association of Visual Artists (VBK) was refused.Winkler was one of the founding members, in May 1971, together with Steffen Terk, Wolfgang Opitz and Harald Gallasch, of the artists' group GAP, which existed until 1976. From 1973 he worked under the pseudonyms Mike Hammer and TM. After serving in the military in 1974, he was awarded the Will Grohmann Prize in 1975 by the West Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1976, Penck met the West German painter Jörg Immendorff, with whom he would collaborate in the following years. In their work they campaigned for the abolition of the German internal border, and for dissidents, among them Rudolf Bahro and Robert Havemann. From 1976, he also signed simply Y. In 1977, some of his paintings were confiscated. In May 1979, several of his works and records were destroyed during a burglary at his studio. On 3 August 1980, he was transferred to West Germany. After emigrating, Penck became one of the leading exponents of the new figuration, along with Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Their work was shown in major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. They were included in several important shows, such as the famous Zeitgeist exhibition at the famous Martin Gropius Bau Museum and the important New Art exhibition at the Tate in 1983. He first lived in Kerpen, southwest of Cologne. In 1981, the Goethe Foundation awarded him the Rembrandt Prize in Basel, Switzerland. In 1983, Winkler moved to London and received the Aachen Art Prize in 1985. In 1988 he took part in the exhibition Made in Cologne, in the same year he was appointed professor of painting at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts.
His paintings depict worlds and spaces of experience, full of symbolic abbreviations. He used stick figures and graphic icons reminiscent of cave paintings, Asian calligraphy and graffiti art. In the 1960s and 1970s, he created a series of paintings and sculptures, which he called Standarts, a combination of "standard" and "art", echoing the German word for banner or flag, Standarte, by which he meant an art form that used simple, archaic pictorial symbols, such as road signs or trademarks. In the 1980s.