Jazz Hands:A.R. Penck at the White Cube.

"There are a number of tendencies in operation, the logical as well as its opposite. It is a slow shifting of different stages of decision making so that the whole system of reference is changing" - A.R. Penck

Well, that doesn't make anything clearer. A.R.Penck's Paintings 1974-1990 at the White Cube in Mason's Yard, Mayfair was an enjoyable little culture blip and the paintings were most definitely aesthetically pleasing but why he'd made them, or what they meant, was open to interpretation at best.

Certainly, the curators weren't giving any clues. The works weren't named and neither was there so much of a free sheet of A4 handed out at the desk as you went in. It was free so no complaints but a bit of background might have been nice. At least there's some on White Cube's website - and, of course, there's always Wikipedia.

As well as my own mind and my own thoughts. This is my blog after all. It ought to reflect my thoughts.

But, mainly, my thoughts were "that looks quite nice" or "I like those colours". Sometimes, "I wonder why he made that one more colourful than most of the others". It's hardly Robert Hughes or Waldemar Januszczak. But then I don't pretend to be. I'm learning more than I am teaching.

I liked the more colourful ones the most though I did enjoy the stick men and the hectic, almost Keith Haring like, graffiti style maelstroms that saw central figures surrounded by all manner of flying or falling debris, shapes, other faces, weird elongated creatures, phantom like sprites, and seemingly random letters of the alphabet.

Some of the works could easily have come from the same febrile mind as Haring's contemporary Jean-Michel Basquiat though Penck comes from a very different background to Haring and Basquiat. Born in Dresden in 1939 as Ralf Winkler, Penck (as he later named himself) was an infant during World War II and, along with his contemporaries Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer - as well as musical acts like Can and Neu, felt the need to find a way to express his experience in the world, as a German, in a way that did not celebrate German's shameful military history.

He did this through printmaking, sculpting, and playing free jazz but this exhibition focuses on the painting alone and Penck's paintings have a kind of duality about them that is sometimes difficult to resolve. It's as if he's trying to seek order through art, to create a universal visual language that brings us together but, at the same time, there's a destructive streak which is perhaps only natural for an artist who, as a young boy, saw his home town destroyed by aerial bombardment.

Before learning, later, that this was (and this is still up for debate) necessary to defeat the evils of the Nazis. Penck once said that "as I get older I realise the necessity to destroy certain things, even within oneself. Aggression is thus transformed in my paintings into a symbol which releases a different kind of power that changes the whole process once again".

Around the time these paintings were made, Penck had moved to London, befriended the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, and even struck up an acquaintance with Basquiat. His love for free jazz was in the ascendancy and you can see, in some of Penck's wilder brushwork, a desire to remove boundaries, to free himself from the constraints not just of the art world but of his own mind.

His painting hands were free jazz hands and he let them solo. He even started using further pseudonyms. Some of which will be familiar:- Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer, Y, and Theodor Marx. For what reason, I have no idea. Clearly there was a lot going on in A.R. Penck's head and he felt a great urge to convert that into art. 

Art that transformed him. If it didn't transform me (and it didn't) I did at least enjoy it. More studies to be done on Penck by this author, perhaps.