Sigmar Polke
Contents
- Life and works of Sigmar Polke
- Short biography
1. Life and works of Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke (born 1941 in Oels, Silesia, now Olesnica, Poland) is a German artist. His family escaped from the Communist regime in East Germany in 1953. Upon his arrival in West Germany, in Wittich, Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory called Dusseldorf Kaiserwerth, before entering the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (Art School) at age twenty. There he made paintings that incorporated photographs on the canvas. Upon graduation in 1968, he published a portfolio of fourteen photographs made with a borrowed camera depicting his tabletop sculptures and his performances. Over the next four years, he made thousands of photographs that were never printed and several films that were never edited, both for lack of money. Self-taught in photography, Polke experimented with chemical developers and fixers, incorporating mistakes and elements of chance into his finished work.
With fellow student Gerhard Richter he formulated at the art academie a Pop called "Capitalist Realism". It's an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertizing. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as ‘Socialist Realism’, then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union (which he had fled from with his family), but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art ‘doctrine’ of western capitalism. 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, and Brazil. He also intermittently taught art in Germany from 1970 to 1978; he then settled in Cologne, where he continues to live and work.
2. Short biography
- 1941: Born in Oels/Schlesien, East Germany
- 1945: Family flees to Thüringen, East Germany
- 1953: Emigrates to West Berlin and then settles in Düsseldorf, West Germany
- 1963: Founds “Kapitalistischen Realismus”(Capitalistic Realism), a painting movement with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (later called Konrad Fischer); “Demonstrative Ausstellung”, store-front exhibition in Düsseldorf with Kuttner, Lueg & Richter
- 1964: “Neodada Pop Decollage Kapitalistischer Realismus”, Galerie René Block, Berlin; Awarded the Young Germans award in Baden-Baden with Klaus Geldmacher and Dieter Krieg
- 1961 - 1967: Studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Karl Otto Goetz and Gerhard Hoehme
- 1975: Awarded the prize for painting at the XIII Bienal de Sao Paulo
- 1986: Awarded a “Golden Lion” at the XLII Biennale di Venezia
- 1988: Awarded the 1988 Baden-Württembergnternational Prize for Painting
- 1977 - 1991: Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg
- 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
Sigmar Polke lives and works in Cologne