Art News

Kunsthaus Zürich presents Encoding Reality: An exhibition featuring Weltbild by A.R. Penck

ZURICH.- From 11 November 2011 to 12 February 2012 the Kunsthaus Zürich is staging the exhibition ‘Encoding Reality,’ the latest in the ‘Picture Ballot!’ series. Taking as its starting point the painting ‘Weltbild’ (World Picture, 1961) by A.R. Penck and the pictographically encoded visual idiom in modern art, it explores works from Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and others. Like Penck, these artists developed a language that was part figurative representation and part abstraction. The exhibition reveals the methods chosen by artists in different generations and programmes to encode reality. At the heart of the exhibition, which includes about 20 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, is a work by Ralf Winkler, better known under the pseudonym A.R. Penck. He was born in Dresden in 1939 and spent the first forty years of his life in