Sigmar Polke – Paintings and Works on Paper
Sigmar Polke was one of the most influential painters of the postwar period, an artist who not only expanded the possibilities of painting but consistently questioned its assumptions. Born in 1941 in Silesia and raised in West Germany, he initially trained as a glass painter before studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There he encountered a generation seeking new artistic languages in the wake of World War II. Together with Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuttner, Polke developed Capitalist Realism in 1963 – an approach that responded to the imagery of Western consumer society with irony and critical distance.
Early on, Polke turned to the visual language of mass media. His famous raster works mimic the dot structures of mechanically reproduced images found in newspapers and advertising. Yet these dots were not printed or silkscreened—they were meticulously painted by hand. In this paradoxical gesture, the supposedly objective language of mass production is revealed as constructed, while painting adopts the appearance of the industrial and serial. The works hover between distance and intimacy, questioning the reliability of images at the moment they seem most familiar.
In the 1970s, this skepticism expanded into works defined by transparency and layering. A 1973 paper work with an erotic motif exemplifies this shift. A couple is shown in intimate proximity, yet the woman’s sideways glance subtly implicates the viewer, lending the scene a performative tone. Desire appears less as private experience than as mediated image—filtered, staged, and quietly ironic.
Following his extensive travels in the 1970s including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia, Polke’s work increasingly moved toward abstraction. Encounters with non-Western cultures and spiritual practices informed a shift away from recognizable imagery toward process-based compositions. Experimenting with unconventional pigments, resins, and chemical reactions, he allowed chance to shape the surface. Colors seep, crystallize, or dissolve, evoking alchemical transformation. Rather than depicting spirituality directly, these works approach it through material change, therefore suggesting painting as a space where perception, matter, and consciousness intersect.
When Polke returned to painting with renewed intensity in the early 1980s, he did so by incorporating industrial textiles. In Kronleuchter (1981), the motif of a chandelier – an emblem of bourgeois aspiration – is placed onto inexpensive patterned fabric. The decorative ground remains visible, destabilizing illusion and undermining traditional hierarchies between artistic refinement and everyday material.
This interplay of quotation and transformation continues in later works such as Untitled (After Grandville) (2005). Here, Polke overlays printed fabric with imagery derived from the nineteenth-century caricaturist J. J. Grandville. The historical motif – poised between satire and fantasy – is displaced into a contemporary painterly context. Textile pattern and borrowed image intersect without resolving into a stable narrative, turning homage into reflection on authorship and the migration of images across time.
Across these works, Polke’s practice emerges as a sustained “politics of skepticism.” Rather than delivering fixed messages, his images entice and withdraw at once. The exhibition of works from 1973 to 2005 makes visible this remarkable continuity through change: a body of work that continually tests perception, disrupts hierarchies of value, and reveals seeing itself as an open, unstable process
Polke’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at leading international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Museum Ludwig, Centre Pompidou, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. His work was also prominently featured in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1986, where he was awarded the Golden Lion, affirming his position as one of the most significant painters of his generation.
Polke’s works are held in the collections of the world’s most prominent museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, Städel Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, underscoring his lasting international significance and institutional recognition.