- Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke (born
February 13 1941 ) is a German painter andphotographer .Life and works
Polke was born in Oels in
Lower Silesia . He fled with his family toThuringia in 1945 during theExpulsion of Germans after World War II . His family escaped from the Communist regime inEast Germany in 1953, traveling first toWest Berlin and then toDüsseldorf .Upon his arrival in
West Germany , inWittich , Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in astained glass factory called Dusseldorf Kaiserswerth, before entering theKunstakademie Düsseldorf (Art School) at age twenty. From 1961-1967 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy underKarl Otto Goetz andGerhard Hoehme and began his creative output during a time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere. During the 1960s,Düsseldorf, in particular, was a prosperous, commercial city and an important center of artistic activity.In 1963 Polke founded “Kapitalistischen Realismus” (Capitalistic Realism), a painting movement with
Gerhard Richter andKonrad Lueg (later calledKonrad Fischer ). It is an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as ‘Socialist Realism ’, then the official art doctrine of theSoviet Union (from which he had fled with his family), but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art ‘doctrine’ of westerncapitalism . He also participated in “Demonstrative Ausstellung”, a store-front exhibition in Düsseldorf with Kuttner, Lueg, and Richter.Polke's 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 1970's. Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions. [Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper 1963-1974, MOMA; ISBN 0-87070-082-0.]
The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed, was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting 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.Polke embarked on a series of world travels throughout the 1970s, photographing in
Pakistan ,Paris ,New York ,Afghanistan , andBrazil . From 1977-1991 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts,Hamburg . He settled inCologne , where he continues to live and work.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. [citation | title= Top Ten Europe | author=Robert Ayers | publisher=MUSEUMS MAGAZINE | year=2007 | date= July 12, 2007| url=http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/25332/top-ten-europe/| accessdate=2008-04-29 ]
Notes and References
Recognition
*1964: “Neodada Pop Decollage Kapitalistischer Realismus”, Galerie René Block, Berlin; Awarded the Young Germans award in
Baden-Baden withKlaus Geldmacher andDieter Krieg
*1975: Awarded the prize for painting at the XIII Bienal de Sao Paulo
*1986: Awarded a “Golden Lion” at the XLIIBiennale di Venezia
*1988: Awarded the 1988Baden-Württemberg International Prize for Painting
*1994: Awarded the Erasmus Prize (Amsterdam)
*1995: Carnegie Award at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania
*1998: International Center of Photography, Infinity Award for Art;P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center , New York
*2002: "Praemium Imperiale" awarded by the Japan Art Association
*2007: Awarded the Rubens Prize (Siegen, Germany) xSee also
*
The Portrait Now External links
* http://www.michaelwerner.com
* [http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/artistInfo/artist/524/lang/1 "Current exhibitions and connection to galeries at Artfacts.Net" ]
* [http://www.galerieleu.de/artists/sigmar_polke/biography/ Exhibitions and literature]
* [http://www.goethe.de/kue/bku/thm/kab/en2132118.htm Portrait of the artist by the Goethe-Institut]
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