Sigmar Polke, artist and art
Born Febr 13 1941, Birth Oels Schlesien, Germany.
Died June 10 2010 deathCologne, Germany.
Impressions:
Layers, surfaces of transparent worlds, dots, patterns, paint strokes, pictures from newspapers and magazines, powdered minerals (toxic smell), alchemical, magical, drugs, un-reproducible, cheap printed fabrics, trash? space, lightness and diversity, fragments of European engravings, nineteenth-century ethnography, art and politics, middle class bourgeois, turbulent worlds, late 20th century… © the-artists.org
Artist biography, artworks, statement, interview, review, exhibition:
Of all his work materials, arsenic is particularly precious to Sigmar Polke. So are lavender oil, meteor dust and flakes of gold and cinnabar, all of which he has incorporated into his paintings at one time or another. On a recent rainy afternoon, however, it was a pure, crystallized violet pigment that preoccupied the artist…
One of the most important and influential figures on the artistic scene today, Sigmar Polke began his professional career as a painter in 1963…
Polke first came to public notice as a founding member of the school of Capitalist Realism. Like Pop Art, the movement concerned itself with the objects and events of daily life. At the same time, however, it sought to be perceived as an ironic take on Socialist Realism. Pictures such as Plastic Tubs (1964) and The Sausage Eater (1963) illustrate the school’s difference to Pop Art, its humorous distance from and critical attitude towards the world of goods and services…
Acrylic, wood, mixed media, framed collage on canvas and material
Sigmar Polke is an artist whose work defies easy definitions. He is one of the most significant painters of the post-war generation, yet his career has by no means been confined to painting. Since the early 1960s Polke has experimented with a wide range of styles and subject matter, bringing together imagery from contradictory or unexpected sources, both historical and contemporary, and using a variety of different materials and techniques. In fact Polke’s artistic diversity, and his resistance to any form of categorisation, has been seen as the only consistent theme in his work…
Auctions & Auction Results
From leading auction houses worldwide, Sigmar Polke on Mutualart
© the-artists.org 1998 -2012  |
You may have seen the Spiderman movie poster in which the Green Goblin appears to change position depending on the viewer’s angle. For almost a century, the gimmick of lenticular printing—placing a thin, striated lens over a flat image to create a fluttering animation effect—has enlivened everything from baseball cards to cereal boxes to campaign buttons. (The technique was employed in 1967 to embed portraits of the Beatles into the cover design of the Stones’ album Their Satanic Majesties Request.) Recently, the painter Sigmar Polke has transmuted this down-market contrivance into a series of works that meld garish gestures and quirky imagery into startlingly vibrant art.
Polke was born in 1941, in what would soon be Communist East Germany; when he was 12, his family moved to Düsseldorf in West Germany, where he eventually attended the city’s art academy. There, he came under the tutelage of Joseph Beuys, whose Fluxus-inspired performances and dismissal of painting as a reactionary medium helped steer Polke, a world-class contrarian, to the easel. michael werner gallery.