Sigmar Polke
Born – Olesnica, Poland 1941
Sigmar Polke grew up in East Germany. After moving with his family to West Germany, settling in Willich, he studied glass painting from 1959 to 1960 at Düsseldorf-Kaiserwerth and then transferred to the Academy of Art. With fellow student Gerhard Richter he formulated and a Pop-inspired “Capital Realist” anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. Paganini, an expression of “the difficulty of purging the demons of Nazism” – witness the “hidden” swastikas – is typical of Polke’s tendency to accumulate a range of different mediums within one canvas. It is not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen-print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated “narrative” is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils.
Masterpieces:
- Girlfriends
- Swimming Pool
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.
Books About sigmar polke
Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois!: Comrades and Contemporaries, The 1970s
Sigmar Polke
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Sigmar Polke: History of Everything, Paintings and Drawings 1998-2003
John R. Lane
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Sigmar Polke Photoworks: The Vanishing Picture
Sigmar Polke
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