A.R. PENCK, alias Ralf Winkler, Mike Hammer, or simply — the briefest of his pseudonymous fronts — Y, is a German artist of the hippie generation who left East Berlin in 1980 and now lives in London. Gwen Hardie is a 25-year-old painter from Edinburgh who lives and works in West Berlin. An unlikely twinning of emigres, they currently share Edinburgh's Fruit Market Gallery: Hardie's raw, powerful paintings upstairs, Penck's raw, not-so-powerful sculptures, accompanied by sketches and a single, bombastic painting, in the lower galleries.
Penck's installation centres on a grove of tall plinths clustered together in the middle of the gallery: small, tribalist sculptures are poised on them at eye-level with mock anthropological earnestness. In Penck's glade of fetishes, stickmen cast in lead gesticulate obscurely and flash massive phalluses; his mystifying Memorial to Tel Aviv props a series of melted, organic-looking bronze lumps and crutches one against the other and mounts them on a cast of a video recorder. It is as if the contents of a Salvador Dali painting had trooped off the wall and come to roost, inexplicably, in the television cabinet.
Penck's declared intention is to create a universal language of forms — he draws on elements from cave painting, hieroglyphics, and pre-modern African art — but if this is Esperanto art, it remains as arcane as that doomed, would-be universal lingo. The titles do little to lift the general gloom of incomprehension. Theory in Hamburg, for example, consists of an irregular T-shape cast in bronze, its crossbar a twisted and rudimentary approximation of a fountain pen. If this smells of in-jokiness, most of the other work stops short at puzzlement.
En masse, Penck's sculptures have a kind of fiddly, obsessive effectiveness — but nothing can rescue them from looking like dated attempts to revive the...
