Provenance: Purchased in the early 1990s from Droysen-Keramikgalerie Kattrin Kühn, Berlin, by the present owner.

By the end of the 1970s, A.R. Penck had reached the limits of his reduced formal language and broadened his artistic range to include a variety of media including ceramics. At the Droysen ceramics gallery, Kattrin Kühn tried out his “Standart” motifs on plates, vases and tea sets. The round form offered a new pictorial space, which could be worked on both sides. Above all, A. R. Penck was interested in the altered materiality of ceramic after the firing. Cracks and bubbles are physical characteristics, of the type which he had previously dispensed with in favour of the signal forms. The ceramic therefore constitutes an interesting symbiosis of two of the artist’s phases: his time as a “Bildforscher” (visual researcher) and the new extended examination of materiality.