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Sigmar Polke

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Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer.

Life and works

Polke was born in Oels in Lower Silesia. He fled with his family to Thuringia in 1945 during the Expulsion of Germans after World War II. His family escaped from the Communist regime in East Germany in 1953, traveling first to West Berlin and then to West German Rhineland.

Upon his arrival in West Germany, in Willich near Krefeld, Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory called Dusseldorf Kaiserswerth, before entering the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Arts Academy) at age twenty. From 1961 to 1967 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Karl Otto Götz, Gerhard Hoehme and deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys. He 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 centre of artistic activity.

In 1963 Polke founded the painting movement "Kapitalistischer Realismus" ("Capitalistic Realism") with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (later called Konrad 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 the Soviet Union and its satellites (from one which he had fled with his family), but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art "doctrine" of western capitalism. 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 1970s. Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions.[1]

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. It was 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 City, Afghanistan, and Brazil. From 1977–1991 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He settled in Cologne, where he continued to live and work until his death in June 2010 after a long battle with cancer.

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.[2]

Polke died on 10 June 2010, in Cologne, Germany, due to complications of cancer.[3]

Recognition

  • 1964: "Neodada Pop Decollage Kapitalistischer Realismus", Galerie René Block, Berlin; Awarded the Young Germans award in Baden-Baden with Klaus Geldmacher and Dieter Krieg
  • 1975: Awarded the prize for painting at the XIII Bienal de São Paulo
  • 1986: Awarded a “Golden Lion” at the XLII Biennale di Venezia
  • 1988: Awarded the 1988 Baden-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
  • 2000: Awarded the Kaiser Ring, Goslar, Germany
  • 2002: "Praemium Imperiale" awarded by the Japan Art Association, Tokyo
  • 2007: Awarded the Rubens Prize (Siegen, Germany)
  • 2008: Foreign Honorary Member in the Field of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 2009: Honorary Member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • 2010: Awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Zurich

See also

References

  1. ^ Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper 1963–1974, MOMA; ISBN 0-87070-082-0.
  2. ^ Robert Ayers (12 July 2007), Top Ten Europe, Museums Magazine, retrieved 29 April 2008
  3. ^ Roberta Smith (11 June 2010), Sigmar Polke, German Painter, Dies at 69, New York Times.
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