A.R. Penck

PENCK is no stranger to Dublin, either personally or aesthetically, and this exhibition presents no obvious shocks. It includes sculptures as well as paintings and drawings - mostly smallish, idiosyncratic bronzes which have a certain casual, "found" look at times, though without seeming arbitrary. The two slender, upstanding, rather totem like bronzes faintly call to mind Brancusi's "endless columns", though of course the scale is far smaller; there is the same reliance on a repeated, continuous, ascending motif.

It is slightly odd - but then, Penck often does things in a slightly odd way - that the paintings on canvas should almost all be small, while the works on paper are larger. Penck has anthropological interests and certainly is highly aware of primitive art, even prehistoric art. His matchstick human figures suggest tribal "rituals, tribal dances", and are, in flat, simplified colours which nevertheless generate plenty of fire.

A rotary, even clockwise, motion is noticeable, and some of the smaller works even resemble clock faces or maps of the zodiac. This gives them an extra quality of dynamism, with that orgiastic sense which is never far away in Penck's work. He is scarcely putting out his full strength in this exhibition, and some of the work is relatively facile, abut it is still very much Penck.