In 1979, the Stasi entered Ralf Winkler’s Dresden studio and trashed the place. It was the culmination of a harassment campaign against the artist, who found fame under the pseudonym AR Penck, for refusing to make social-realist propaganda. Instead, his paintings featured oft-repeated hieroglyphs, odd symbols and signs, seemingly child-like naive scrawls and simple stick men (often with outsized penises). The authorities were right to be suspicious of this new painterly style: Penck sought the construction of a new language, one that mixed the linguistic and pictorial, that was both “universal” and “democratic”. It was a wish born of the trauma of the second world war, particularly witnessing the destruction of Dresden as a child, and the ensuing dystopia of the German Democratic Republic. Penck’s visual language, which he termed “standart” is, on the surface at least, one that could be mastered by anyone. There is a “building block system”, as he once said; a glossary of motifs to be picked out and played with on a whim. In fact, few would bring the rhythm and lyricism that Penck, a jazz fan, brought to the canvas. With their profusion of wide eyes, humanoid forms, beasts and birds, his paintings are suggestive of the real world, but they also lean on theories of abstraction, in which noughts, crosses and other symbols flirt across a work’s surface with a pride in pure painterly gesture. Escaping his censors, Penck smuggled paintings to the west with the help of Cologne gallerist Michael Werner, whose gallery the artist worked with until his death in 2017, and who now represents the Penck estate. A new show at Werner’s London townhouse gallery traces the artist’s career, from his beginning to the international stardom he eventually found. Most accounts note it was the Stasi raid that catalysed his defection in 1980 but, more likely, the East Berlin regime sold the artist to their counterparts across the wall as part of the lucrative and highly secret Häftlingsfreikauf programme, which allowed the GDR to bring in much-needed foreign currency and rid itself of intellectual troublemakers. Either way, for Penck, it came as a relief. Settling in Cologne, the artist hung out with Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke, a gang the press dubbed the Neue Wilde – the Young Savages. More formally, throughout the 1980s these artists developed neo-expressionism between them, a form of painting characterised by its rough emotional pull. While Penck’s importance to this new genre was confirmed by his appearance in key survey shows, Zeitgeist at the Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 1982, and New Art at the Tate, London, a year later, the artist’s source material reveals a more nuanced set of references. The science fiction Penck read as a child while the RAF carpet-bombed Dresden remained an enduring influence, while a set of rarely seen textile sculptures, included in the new Werner exhibition, underline his interests in genetics, ecology, systems theory and cybernetics. With his work, Penck sought to understand how people, objects and ideas rubbed up against each other, how thoughts could be expressed beyond words and how a path out of the inherent conflict of the world might be mapped. Go figure: four works by AR Penck Untitled, 1966 In one of the earliest works in the exhibition, the artist’s interest in systems are on show. A man is seen picking a fruit, before he is shown eating and lastly defecating. Far from demonstrating man’s divine supremacy over nature, his internal organs are reduced to nodes in a natural ecosystem. tskrie VIII, 1984 Penck also spent time in London. The title of the largest work in the show is an anagram of “strike”, and is a homage to the miners’ struggle. Despite the harassment he received in East Germany, Penck was sympathetic to socialism. “Everything is paradox and schizophrenic … reactionary and progressive, decadent and fascistic,” he said of his work’s politics. “So am I! So are you!” Y, 1978 We can assume this is a self-portrait, even though the stick man has no features. “Y” was one of a number of names Penck exhibited under (others include “Mickey Spilane” and “Theodor Marx”). Werner would arrive at his studio, dropping off forbidden music, books and, as Penck became successful, bags of West German marks. In return he would smuggle out paintings signed under the fictitious guises. Reaktor, 1990 Penck wanted children to enjoy his work, despite its intellectual underpinnings. His felt sculptures are playful, but dozens of sketches included in this new show reveal that he designed the interconnecting tubes and balls with a molecular understanding of how humans have altered the very building blocks of nature. This work was made four years after the Chernobyl disaster.