Sigmar Polke (1941 - 2010)
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Polke's early work has often been characterised as European Pop art for its depiction of everyday subject matter\u2014sausages, bread and potatoes\u2014combined with images from the mass media. His "Rasterbilder" from that period are works that exploit the raster-dot technique of printing as a way as of subverting and bringing into question the apparent truth, validity and purpose of the media images that his paintings appropriate.[12] He imitated the dotted effect of commercial newsprint by painstakingly painting each dot with the rubber at the end of a pencil.[13] In works such as Carl Andre in Delft (1968), the Propellerfrau (1969) or, later, Protective Custody (1978) Polke used a canvas made of furnishing fabric, thus elevating it to the status of a visual motif.[14] His creative output during this time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere, demonstrate most vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and subversive approach in his drawings, watercolors, and gouaches produced during the 1960s and 1970s. Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions.[15]
Returning to painting in the 1980s, he maintained his interest in alchemical properties.[5] In 1980, he began exploring Australia and Southeast Asia, working with materials like arsenic, meteor dust, smoke, uranium rays, lavender, cinnabar and a purple pigment from the mucous excreted by snails.[16] He began to make large, gestural paintings which combined figurative and abstract imagery. During the 1980s he experimented with materials and chemicals, mixing together traditional pigments with solvents, varnishes, toxins and resins to produce spontaneous chemical reactions.[13] These experiments produced elaborate abstract paintings which reflect on the concepts of originality and authorship which underpin the Modernist tradition and, in particular, the mystique of American Abstract Expressionism.[17] 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. Polke often soaked the fabric for his paintings in resin to make it transparent. He also painted the coloured shapes on the back, so they show through as shadowy forms.[9] By pouring colour substances on a laid out canvass and directing the process only to a restricted degree through swaying the picture's surface, Polke surrenders the task of pictorial invention to the colours themselves.[18]
In 1994, he produced The Three Lies of Painting, where a landscape containing a mountain and a tree is intercut with abstract devices before succumbing to the intrusive presence of a large, vertical strip of printed fabric. It is festooned with multicoloured hands, suggesting once again that Polke wants to emphasise the artist's own manipulative.[19] In the mid-1990s Polke began to work on a new series called Druckfehler, or \u2018Printing Mistakes\u2019, inspired by printing errors found in newspapers. Fascinated by the relationship between the random mistake and the original image, Polke would enlarge and manipulate the distorted newsprint. He then paints the image onto a polyester surface with the aid of a projector, and coats it in layers of resin. Buried within this elaborate surface are sheets of gold mesh, creating yet another filter through which the image must be read.[20] In a few cases, Polke "manufactured" these so-called mistakes; the elongated figures in Aus 'Lernen neu zu Lernen' (From 'Learning to Learn Anew') (1998) are the result of his having dragged a picture through a photocopier.
In 2002, Polke developed a new technique of \u2018machine painting\u2019. These are his first completely mechanically-produced paintings and are made by tinting and altering images on a computer and then photographically transferring them onto large sheets of fabric. Up until this point Polke had rejected mechanical processes, preferring to explore the visual effects of mechanical technology by hand.[21]
From 2007, Polke continued to develop and refine his "Lens Paintings" series.[5] The conceptual framework of the Lens Paintings is grounded in theories set forth by monk Johann Zahn in a 1685 book on a \u201cteledioptric artificial eye\u201d, a forerunner of the telephoto lens. Polke's painted \u201clens\u201d generates a variety of distortions, mutations and spatial illusions when seen from different viewpoints.[citation needed]
Films[edit]
When asked to participate in Konrad Fischer's museum exhibition "Konzeption/Conception" (1969) at Museum Morsbroich, Polke suggested he make a film in which he scratches himself and uses a pendulum. The resulting film Der ganze Körper fühlt sich leicht und möchte fliegen (The Whole Body Feels Light and Wants to Fly) (1969), made in collaboration with Christof Kohlhöfer, is a 35-minute piece in which, Polke scratches himself and uses a pendulum. He also reads from the esoteric 19th-century grimoires The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses (almost inaudibly as he keeps giggling all the time) and poses as the letter X, with parallel lines of white string connecting the legs of his trousers with the arms of his shirt.[22]
Commissioned works[edit]
For the reopening of the Reichstag in Berlin in 1999, Polke created a series of large, three-dimensional lightboxes. Lighted from behind, images seen through the grooved surfaces of these lightboxes change as the viewer moves past them.[citation needed] Drawing on his early glass-painting training, Polke realized a series of stained-glass windows for the Grossmünster cathedral in Zurich between 2006 and 2009.
Exhibitions[edit]
Polke had his first one-person show at Galerie René Block, West Berlin, in 1966, and in 1970 he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Michael Werner.[citation needed][clarification needed] His first solo exhibition in New York, of paintings made at least a decade earlier, was at the Holly Solomon Gallery in SoHo in 1982.[23] Following a 1987 show at the Milwaukee Art Museum grouping Warhol, Beuys and Polke, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago mounted a solo show for Polke in 1991. Polke exhibited at three documenta and several Venice Biennial exhibitions.
By the latter years of his life, Polke's artistic achievements were being recognised in large-scale exhibitions around the world, with solo shows at Tate Modern in 2003\u20132004, Tokyo's Ueno Royal Museum in 2005 and the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2007.[24] In 2007, the "Museum Moderner Kunst" (MUMOK) held an exhibition of Polke's work entitled "Sigmar Polke: Retrospektive".[citation needed] Also in 2007, Axial Age (2005\u20132007), a monumental cycle of paintings, was shown for the first time at the 2007 Venice Biennale, with the wish explicitly expressed by the artist that the work should remain on display in Venice.[25] Polke is scheduled to have a retrospective "Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963\u20132010" shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, from 19 April to 3 August 2014, then travels to Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.[26]
Legacy[edit]
Through his numerous high-profile exhibitions, Polke exerted an international influence, affecting somewhat younger artists such as his compatriots Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Lara Schnitger from the Netherlands, the Americans Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel and David Salle, and the Swiss duo Fischli & Weiss.[27][28] The artist John Baldessari described Polke as an "artist\u2019s artist".[29] Today, Polke is often grouped with Gerhard Richter because both came of age and experimented in West Germany in the 1960s.[29]
Art market[edit]
Polke achieved early success for his paintings and drawings of consumer goods.[30] His mid-1960s works remain the artist's most recognizable and have performed the best at auction. A first record price for Polke's work at auction was established at Christie's in London in 2007 when 2.7 million pounds (then $5.3 million) were paid for a 1966 canvas titled Strand (Beach).[31] At a Sotheby's auction in London in 2011, Polke's City Painting II (1968) sold for $7.4 million, and his Jungle (1967) established a new record for the artist at $9.2 million.[32] Meanwhile, Untitled (São Paolo Series) (1975, a series of 10 photographs ten large photographic images which Polke made for the São Paulo Biennial in 1975, sold at Christie's London in February 2006 for 3568,000 ($988,000).[33] Dschungel (Jungle) (1967), a romantic landscape from that used magnified Benday dots from a newspaper in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, sold from the collection of Count Christian Duerckheim to an unidentified telephone bidder for $9.2 million at Sotheby's in 2011;[34] by 2015, it sold again for $27.1 million.[35]
The Estate of Sigmar Polke has been established by his heirs\u2014his widow, artist Augustina Baroness von Nagel, daughter Anna Polke, and son Georg Polke\u2014to build up an archive in the artist\u2018s Cologne studio. The Estate also administers the artist\u2018s intellectual property rights. A Catalogue Raisonné of paintings, photographs and works on paper is currently being prepared by the Estate.[36]
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