Sigmar Polke German, 1941-2010

Sigmar Polke (1941, Oels / Schlesien, today Poland – 2010, Cologne, Germany)

From 1961 to 1967 Sigmar Polke studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Since the beginning of his work in the 60s, he has been one of the central personalities of German art. He was both a painter and a photographer and worked both abstractly and figuratively. Through experiments with ever new painting materials and image carriers, Polke created a diverse oeuvre that could not be clearly assigned to any contemporary movement from the beginning. To this day, the traces of his "early damage by Dada" – as Polke says about himself – can be seen in his work. As early as 1963, in the heyday of Art Informel, Polke plunged into the inflation of reproduced images and copied printed material. His theme world is a world of clichés. Grid dots next to the spontaneous gesture, figurative next to abstract, Dürer's rabbit next to waffle biscuits - Polke thus succeeded as an artist in maintaining the tension with a juxtaposition and superimposition of different techniques and media. Few other artists have been written about as much as about him, the painter, filmmaker and photographer, social critic and necromancer, the clown and the chaotic. Change and transformation have determined his life.

Polke's goal is "to create a world of equal, free appearances, a world in which the phenomena can finally relate to each other again, which are free from feverish, servile causality and narrow-minded, point-fingering consecutio ...".

The four-part work "Untitled" from 1971 juxtaposes four such apparitions in a sketchy abbreviation: sunset, man in the garden, girl in skirt and knee-high socks, arm of a comic hero. Polke quotes ciphers of everyday culture and observes with amusement how the "apparitions" shift each other in their message and how color and line take on a life of their own into abstract compositional elements.

In addition to his own artistic activities, Sigmar Polke also taught as a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg between 1971 and 1992, with several interruptions.
In 1976 he showed the first retrospective at the Kunsthalle Tübingen. From 1972 to 1982 he participated in the Documenta 5 and 7 in Kassel.
In 1986 he received the Grand Prize of the Venice Biennale and in 1999 the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a solo exhibition to him as one of the first German artists. His work is represented in the following museums, among others: Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Britain, London; Getty Center, Los Angeles.

One of Polke's last major projects was the design of twelve church windows in Zurich's Grossmünster. After his death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York  dedicated another exhibition to him in 2014, in which his artistic work was honored with a retrospective.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Bank GmbH