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A.R. Penck passed away on 2 May 2017, aged 77. 77 years... this number seems technical, sounds like a statistical average. And leads down a completely incorrect track. It suggests that one can count life. One can actually only recount it. In this sense, Penck turned at least 100 years old. Or even 1000. Now, after his passing, one can clearly see what a great German epic he had lived, which was neither numerically, nor statistically comprehensible. In doing so it offers at least a comparison: none of his artistic contemporaries had a comparable rocky life path.

Penck, born 1939, known by his …