Sigmar Polke

Biography

Sigmar Polke was born in Lower Silesia. His family escaped from the Communist regime in East Germany in 1953, traveling first to West Berlin and then to Düsseldorf. Upon his arrival in West Germany, Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory, before entering the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Art School) at age twenty. From 1961-1967 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and began his creative output during a time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere.

In 1963 Polke founded "Kapitalistischen Realismus" (Capitalistic Realism), a painting movement emphasizing an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. Polke's creative output demonstrates 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.

In 2007, Vienna's Museum Moderner Kunst held an exhibition of Polke's work entitled, Sigmar Polke: Retrospektive that spanned his career from his appropriations of Pop imagery and continuing through decades of perplexing compositions and clever critiques to arrive at current works that employ a haze of chemicals, minerals, and paints. From 1977-1991 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He settled in Cologne, where he continues to live and work.

Selected Works

Sigmar Polke 'S oder die Liebe zum Stoff, 2000 serigraph on fabric 39 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches