polsi0268
Sigmar Polke

German artist Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) is widely considered to be one of the most influential painters of the postwar era. Characterized by an experimental approach to a wide variety of styles, media, and subject matter, Polke's work engages unconventional and diverse materials and techniques, as well as the use of ironic and humorous imagery, as strategies of social, political, and aesthetic critique.

Polke received his first artistic training, beginning in 1959, as a glass painter, and in 1961 he enrolled at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to study painting. In 1963, Polke, along with fellow students Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, and Gerhard Richter, organized an exhibition of their own work in an empty butcher’s shop in Düsseldorf. The show helped to launch the artists' early careers and first introduced the term “Capitalist Realism.” By the end of the decade, Polke would have solo exhibitions at such notable galleries as Galerie René Block, Berlin; Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf; Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich; and Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne.

Since Polke’s first participation in documenta 5 in 1972, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at significant institutions, including Sigmar Polke. Bilder, Tücher, Objekte. Werkauswahl 1962-1971, which was held at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 1976. In 1983, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam hosted Sigmar Polke that traveled to Kunstmuseum Bonn in 1984. Harald Szeemann curated a retrospective of Polke’s work in 1984, which was held at the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Cologne. In 1988, Polke exhibited new work in the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. An extensive retrospective, Sigmar Polke. Die drei Lügen der Malerei, was presented at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, in 1997, and traveled to the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin in 1997-1998.

His first U.S. retrospective took place at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York in 1990-1992. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles organized an exhibition of Polke’s photographs (Sigmar Polke: Photoworks. When Pictures Vanish) in 1995-1997, which traveled to Site Santa Fe, New Mexico (1996), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1996-1997). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized an overview of the artist’s works on paper in 1999, which traveled to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Polke’s work was also featured in solo exhibitions at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, and the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Sigmar Polke. Alchimist, 2001); the Dallas Museum of Art (Sigmar Polke: History of Everything. Recent Paintings and Drawings, 2002-2003, which traveled to Tate Modern, London in 2003); Kunsthaus Zürich (Sigmar Polke. Werke & Tage, 2005); Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo (Sigmar Polke: Alice in Wonderland, which traveled to The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2005-2006); Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim (Sigmar Polke. Fotografien 1964-2000, 2006); J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Sigmar Polke: Photographs 1968-1972, 2007); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Sigmar Polke. Wir Kleinbürger! Zeitgenossen und Zeitgenossinnen. Die 1970er Jahre, 2009-2010); and the Musée de Grenoble (2013-2014). The comprehensive retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010 was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2014-2015). In 2018, Sigmar Polke: Photographs 70-80 was presented at the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany, and In Focus: Sigmar Polke in the Lambrecht-Collection was on view at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany, in 2018-2019. Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia, presented Sigmar Polke – Music from an Unknown Source in 2019. A solo exhibition of the artist’s work was on view at Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2022. 

During his lifetime, Polke was included in numerous international biennales, including documenta, the Bienal de São Paulo, and the Venice Biennale, and received a number of awards, including the Golden Lion for his solo presentation at the West German Pavilion in 1986 at the Venice Biennale, the Erasmus Prize (1994), the Carnegie Prize (1995), the Praemium Imperiale (2002), and the Roswitha Haftmann-Preis (2010), among others. In addition to Galerie René Block, Galerie Schmela, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, and Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Polke showed regularly at Galerie BAMA, Paris, Galerie Toni Gerber, Bern, and Michael Werner Gallery, Berlin and New York. 

Polke’s work is included in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including Art Institute of Chicago; The Broad, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou - Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and Tate, London, among others.

The Estate of Sigmar Polke is exclusively represented by David Zwirner. In May 2016, the gallery presented its first exhibition of the artist's work at the 537 West 20th Street location in New York; the show was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Sigmar Polke and curated by Vicente Todolí.

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 Installation view of Sigmar Polke. Dualismen at Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, dated 2022.

 Installation view, Sigmar Polke. Dualismen, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, 2022. Photo by ARTIS – Uli Deck 

March 5–June 19, 2022

The Municipal Gallery Karlsruhe, in cooperation with Artforum and Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, presents Sigmar Polke. Dualismen: a comprehensive exhibition providing significant insight into Polke's multifaceted work from 1963 to 2009. Focusing on the basic principles of his creative output, the concept of dualism, integral to Polke's oeuvre, is explored and interrogated. The works demonstrate the artist's desire to overcome and bridge the divide between supposed contradictions and polarities within culture and aesthetics—what divides high and low is interrogated and challenged.

Sigmar Polke’s practice and artistic output are diverse and wide-ranging, from drawing, painting, photography, film, sculpture, and print. His career favors experimentation and indeterminateness as he expanded his creative identity beyond the limits of medium and tradition. He created large-format individual works and extensive series, drawing upon the specific possibilities inherent in each medium and combining them in various ways. Sigmar Polke. Dualismen allows audiences to explore Polke’s expansive breadth of work within a singular experience.

Learn more at Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe.

March 31–June 26, 2022

In collaboration with the IFA and the Goethe Institute of Germany, the National Museum of Fine Arts is pleased to present Sigmar Polke: Music from an Unknown Source (2022) as part of the 14th edition of the Havana Biennial. The exhibition, composed of a total of forty works of watercolor, marks the inaugural showing of the artist in Cuba, a truly historic event.

The artistic output of Sigmar Polke, one of the most relevant artists of recent decades, is varied in terms of techniques and concepts. Polke used elements of modern painting, along with others from mass culture, such as kitsch or advertising, to create a dialogue between high and low forms of cultural output. His pieces make use of mixed materials, resulting in poetic constructions full of nuance and irony that reflects his commitment to aesthetic transformation and social protest. The current exhibition provides viewers with critical insight into this fertile and prolific artist's mind.

Learn more at The National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana

June 26–October 17, 2021

In celebration of its 30th anniversary, CCS Bard presents the exhibition, Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection (2021) Marieluise Hessel, who cofounded the Center for Curatorial Studies in 1990, spent a lifetime collecting art. The works presented are drawn from the span of four decades of Hessel's life spent in Germany, Mexico, and the United States, comprising over 75 drawings and works on paper. These collection highlights were selected for their particular resonance on issues of gender, sexuality, race, and politics. Revisiting different artistic periods and contexts, the exhibition draws out both contrasts and comparisons between artists, modes of representation, and the continuing vitality of drawing (and paper) as an artistic medium.

The title of the exhibition is suggestive of the intimacy of the act of drawing itself, a theme amply developed throughout with artists as diverse as Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer, Nancy Spero, and Germán Venegas. As a reflection of Hessel’s collection and geographic trajectory of her life, from early years in post-war Germany to residence in Mexico City and on to New York City and the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the exhibition is organized around these three spheres of influence that characterize the collection from origins to the present day. The range—and eclecticism of the collection—is represented by more than drawing per se, and includes collages, prints, artist books, and special editions.

The catalogue, Closer to Life, has been published to accompany the exhibition. The publication highlights an approach to drawing as a primary medium, not as documentation or as a study for works in other media, but as a fragile medium used to explore intimate subject matters.

Learn more at CCS Bard Galleries.


Installation view of Productive Image Interference: Sigmar Polke and Artistic Perspectives Today, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, dated 2021.

Installation view, Productive Image Interference: Sigmar Polke and Artistic Perspectives Today, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2021. Photo by Katja Illner

November 12, 2021–June 3, 2022

To mark the 80th anniversary of Sigmar Polke’s birth, the Anna Polke Foundation and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf have joined to initiate an exhibition project, Productive Image Interference (2022). The project brings the prolific works of Sigmar Polke into dialogue with current artistic discourse and practices, juxtaposing his works with contemporary artists.

Based on current research, the exhibition is the first to focus on a specific approach that characterizes Polke’s oeuvre: his use of appropriation and quotations of existing imagery. Polke’s technique, his handling of different media, contexts, and materials, relies on the potential of the supposedly flawed, blurred, and mutable. His works play with the pleasure of the illusion and in so doing question the effectiveness of (manipulated) images in different ways and various media. This productive interference of images is also a central strategy for the current generation of artists. The selected works by contemporary international artists show new techniques and methods that illustrate how forms of visual interference remain a productive starting point for creative work today in the negotiation of cultural and political issues.

Participating artists: Kerstin Brätsch, Phoebe Collings-James, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Trevor Paglen, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Max Schulze, Avery Singer

The exhibition is curated by Kathrin Barutzki and Nelly Gawellek (both from the Anna Polke Foundation) along with Gregor Jansen (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf).

Learn more at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

January 16–February 22, 2020

The Arts Club of Chicago’s 89th Exhibition of Professional Members took place in January and February 2020. The first exhibition of artist members’ work was held in 1916, the same year that The Arts Club was established. This year’s exhibition will feature the work of The Arts Club’s visual artist members, and continues The Arts Club’s long-standing tradition of, and commitment to, furthering the arts. This exhibition included locally, nationally, and internationally esteemed artists, working in a wide variety of media and a breadth of historical influences.

The Arts Club of Chicago was founded with the mission to expand the artistic horizons of a public interested in the arts and related activities and maintains its public galleries—‚free of admission, for that purpose. Since its inception, and as a part of its mission, The Arts Club membership has included both professional artists and lay members. Throughout its history, The Arts Club has produced significant exhibitions of artists such as John Baldessari, Constantin Brancusi (installed by Marcel Duchamp), Alexander Calder, Peter Doig, David Hockney, Maya Lin, Chris Ofili, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Jackson Pollock, and Auguste Rodin.

Learn more at The Arts Club of Chicago.

This exhibition celebrated the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last century, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee's magnificent promised gift of over sixty extraordinary photographs in honor of The Met's 150th anniversary in 2020. The collection is particularly notable for its breadth and depth of works by women artists, its sustained interest in the nude, and its focus on artists' beginnings. The exhibition will include masterpieces by the medium's greatest practitioners, including works by Diane Arbus, Joseph Cornell, Walker Evans, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Paul Strand, Andy Warhol, and Edward Weston.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Learn more at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sigmar Polke’s 1966 artwork Strand

Sigmar Polke, Strand, 1966. The Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection, MGKSiegen, © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

November 4, 2018–March 15, 2019

For the first time, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst presents collectively all twenty-six works and series by Sigmar Polke from the Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection. The variety of techniques, artistic interests, and references Polke uses are exemplified within the exhibition. The common thread weaving together all of the works on view is painting, which shifts from being more to less visible. Polke artfully draws on the connections between painting and other mediums, in particular photography, blurring lines that traditionally set these practices apart.

Polke is famed for his anarchic style and methods—assembling diverse materials, motifs, and artistic traditions to create a truly unique pictorial identity. Such experimentations are richly displayed in the current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen, which places emphasis on a novel technique employed by Polke, the method of lenticular printing. This method creates the illusion of changes in depth as the onlooker shifts their viewing angle. The images thus become animated with the viewer’s movements. Thirty of the eighty works presented in the exhibition utilize lenticular printing, many of which will be shown for the very first time.

Learn more at Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen.

May 27–September 2, 2018

Based on an extensive collection of previously unpublished photographs, the exhibition reveals Sigmar Polke as an alchemist of photographic matter and a chronicler of the Rhineland art scene. Polke embraced the photographic medium early on, as both a documentary source for his paintings and as a means of making in itself. There is reciprocal contamination between the two practices in Polke’s work, so much so that it is just as possible to evoke the photographic dimension of his paintings as it is to speak of the painterly quality of his photographs. His approach to photography was, from the beginning, that of an amateur craftsman. Polke always developed and printed his photographs himself, irrespective of the rules (not heeding to correct times of exposure and using out-of-date paper and chemicals), flippantly practicing under- and over-exposure as well as double-exposure.

There is no hierarchy in these images in which “family” photos, self-portraits taken with associates and accomplices, snapshots, documents destined to be worked on visually, graphic and chemical experiments, travel snaps, as well as pictures made under the influence of drugs are all brought together. Polke compounded taxonomies, classifications, and sacred oppositions: documentary and fiction, archives and personal mythology, art, and advertising, amateur and professional, experimental, and popular.

Painting contaminated by photography, photography poisoned by painting: Polke’s art is contained in this toggle switch. His photographic infamies are in this regard exemplary of an aesthetic and ethical position that is profoundly libertarian. Polke did not try to “save” painting by photography or to ennoble photography through painting, following a rather stale notion of contemporary rhetoric. On the contrary, he amplified the two enemy sisters’ bad reputations.

Learn more at Museum Morsbroich.

February 11 – June 25, 2017

Sigmar Polke: Alchemy and Arabesque presented Sigmar Polke's work through the lens of his engagement with unusual materials, techniques, and compositions, highlighting the experimental and inquisitive approach that characterizes his practice.

The exhibition was accompanied by a publication featuring texts by Helmut Friedel and Barbara Vinken and an interview with the artist by Bice Curiger. Published by Schirmer | Mosel

Read more: a profile of Polke in The New York Times ahead of the presentation of 90 works in the Palazzo Grassi during the 2007 Venice Biennale

A major solo exhibition of Sigmar Polke's work was on view at Palazzo Grassi, Venice in 2016. The show presented 90 works from five decades of the artist's career.

The accompanying trilingual catalogue (Italian, English, French) was published by Marsilio Editori. It features texts by Elena Geuna and Guy Tosatto and reproduces over 85 works, including photographs and sculptures, along with numerous paintings.

(New York & London) David Zwirner is pleased to announce the gallery's exclusive worldwide representation of The Estate of Sigmar Polke.

Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-2010) is considered to be one of the most significant and influential artists of the postwar era. His work was recently the subject of a critically acclaimed traveling retrospective that was held in 2014- 2015 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

As stated by David Zwirner, "Being able to work with The Estate of Sigmar Polke is a dream come true. Growing up in Cologne, I had the great fortune of meeting Sigmar and witnessing firsthand the enormous influence he exerted on his generation and the ones that followed. His creativity and curiosity knew no bounds, and his ability to innovate across different media is unparalleled. We are very much looking forward to presenting and exploring the different facets of his work as we develop exhibitions with the Estate. We are honored that the Estate has entrusted us to further Sigmar Polke’s important legacy."

The gallery is planning its first exhibition of Polke's work in collaboration with the Estate, which will take place in New York in May 2016.

Sigmar Polke is widely recognized for his multidisciplinary output of paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, objects, installations, and films. Characterized by a relentlessly experimental and inquisitive approach to a wide variety of styles and subject matter, the artist's work engages unconventional materials and techniques, and playfully defies social, political, and aesthetic conventions. Throughout his prolific career, Polke challenged the limits of his subject matter and materials in a rigorously inventive investigation of image-making and perception.

Polke was born in 1941 in Oels, Silesia, a region now part of modern day Poland; in 1945, at the end of World War II, his parents, aunt, and six siblings fled to Thuringia in central Germany. In 1953, the family escaped the Communist regime of the German Democratic Republic, arriving in Düsseldorf by way of West Berlin.

He received his first artistic training, beginning in 1959, as a glass painter, and in 1961 he enrolled at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to study painting. In 1963, Polke, along with fellow students Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, and Gerhard Richter, organized an exhibition of their own work in an empty butcher’s shop in Düsseldorf. The show helped to launch the artists’ early careers and first introduced the term "Capitalist Realism." By the end of the decade, Polke would have solo exhibitions at such notable galleries as Galerie René Block, Berlin; Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf; Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich; and Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne.

Since Polke's first participation in documenta 5 in 1972, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at significant institutions, including Sigmar Polke. Bilder, Tücher, Objekte. Werkauswahl 1962-1972, which was held at the Kunsthalle Tübingen; Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 1976. In 1983, the Museum Boijmans-Van-Beuningen, Rotterdam hosted Sigmar Polke that traveled to Kunstmuseum Bonn in 1984. Harald Szeemann curated a retrospective of Polke's work in 1984, which was held at the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Cologne. In 1988, Polke exhibited new work in the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. An extensive retrospective, Sigmar Polke. Die drei Lügen der Malerei, was presented at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, in 1997, and traveled to the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin in 1997-1998.

His first U.S. retrospective took place at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York in 1990- 1992. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles organized an exhibition of Polke’s photographs (Sigmar Polke: Photoworks. When Pictures Vanish) in 1995-1997, which traveled to Site Santa Fe, New Mexico (1996), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1996-1997). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized an overview of the artist’s works on paper in 1999, which traveled to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

More recently, Polke's work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, and the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Sigmar Polke. Alchimist, 2001); the Dallas Museum of Art (Sigmar Polke: History of Everything. Recent Paintings and Drawings, 2002-2003, which traveled to Tate Modern, London, in 2003); Kunsthaus Zürich (Sigmar Polke. Werke & Tage, 2005); Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo (Sigmar Polke: Alice in Wonderland, which traveled to The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2005-2006); Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim (Sigmar Polke. Fotografien 1964-2000, 2006); J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Sigmar Polke: Photographs 1968-1972, 2007); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Sigmar Polke. Wir Kleinbürger! Zeitgenossen und Zeitgenossinnen. Die 1970er Jahre, 2009-2010); and the Musée de Grenoble (2013-2014). The comprehensive retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963- 2010 was recently held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2014-2015).

During his lifetime, Polke was included in numerous international biennales, including documenta, the Bienal de São Paulo, and the Venice Biennale, and received a number of awards, including the Golden Lion for his solo presentation at the West German Pavilion in 1986 at the Venice Biennale, the Erasmus Prize (1994), the Carnegie Prize (1995), the Praemium Imperiale (2002), and the Roswitha Haftmann-Preis (2010), among others. In addition to Galerie René Block, Galerie Schmela, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, and Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Polke showed regularly at Galerie BAMA, Paris, Galerie Toni Gerber, Bern, and Michael Werner Gallery, Berlin and New York. Polke's work is included in the permanent collections of major museums around the world.

Catalogue Raisonné Project
The Estate of Sigmar Polke is producing a catalogue raisonné devoted to Polke's work. The Estate is currently compiling a comprehensive record of the artist's paintings, works on paper, prints, photographs, objects, Xerox works, installations, and films.

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