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Sigmar Polke, Freundinnen, 1965/1966, Öl auf Leinwand, 150 x 190 cm, Sammlung Froehlich, Stuttgart, Courtesy of Sigmar Polke.

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Bärchen), Detail, 1995, 131.5 x 152 cm, Artificial resin and lacquer on fabric, Museum Frieder Burda.

Sigmar Polke, B-Mode, detail, 1987, Lack auf synthetischer Baumwolle, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, © Sigmar Polke.

MUMOK
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1
Vienna
+43-1-525 00
Sigmar Polke,
A Retrospective
June 23- October 7, 2007

Sigmar Polke, one of the most highly regarded German painters internationally, is also considered one of the most important artists of the post-war period. A Retrospective brings together seminal works from the Frieder Burda, Josef Froehlich and Reiner Speck collections. With over 170 works it is one of the biggest Polke exhibitions of recent years.

Due to the unique interaction between the Polke foci in the individual collections the exhibition offers an extensive and differentiated overall view of the development of his work in which, with the exception of photography, all the “Polke genres” are represented. 60 large scale pictures and more that 110 works on paper from the last four decades substantiate the thematic diversity and stylistic pluralism of the artist who was born in 1941 in East Silesia and today lives in Cologne. His dense early oeuvre as well as his more recent work concerned with painterly technique and material experimentation is defined by transitions and the interplay between figuration and abstraction. It has references to traditions in art history and the flood of media images, conceptual reflection and a colourful, ornamental sensuality.

Even while still a student of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art Polke originated “capitalist realism” other artists including his then long-time friend, Gerhard Richter. It was critically and ironically concerned with Pop Art, influenced by the promises of the consumer world, “socialist realism” and the myths of modernism. He drew banal holiday scenes and advertising subjects with a ballpoint pen on cheap paper or ironically monumentalised them in panels such as Liebespaar (1967) or Reis (1963).

He satirised disrespectfully the art business and an exaggerated image of the artist in the famous picture Höhere Wesen befahlen… (1969) or in the picture Moderne Kunst (1968).

In the late 60’s the so-called fabric and half-tone dot screen images became his trademark. From a critical standpoint and ironic distance he directed his attention to the dreams and promises of the blossoming consumer and leisure society: printed fabrics, often with patterns bordering on kitsch, served as background for paintings such as Dürer Hase [Dürer Hare] (1968) or Carl Andre in Delft (1968).

At the same time Polke turned to mass media image production. Initially he copied printed examples with caricature-like exaggeration. Following this he became increasingly interested in the half-tone screens used for photographic reproductions and transferred enlarged newspapers photographs to canvas. In part the dots developed into independent ornaments and were superimposed on the painting’s “subjects” such as in the well-known pictures Freundinnen (1965/66) or Interieur (1966). On the other hand, in a gesture of self-parody, he transformed the dots into colourfully painted figures as in Kartoffelköpfe (Mao &LBJ) (1965) thus humorously distancing himself from his own means of expression.

Over the years Polke expanded his pictorial language with a number of new stylistic, formal and content-related aspects. Gloss paint works and poured paintings that were created using processes that were only under limited control and subject to subsequent processes of change, earned him a reputation for being an alchemist amongst painters. Using photo chemicals he investigated his painting materials for their sensitivity to light and heat. As if moved by external forces, colours run on fabric and suggest subjects — which Polke comments with a wink when he called his picture Tischerücken (1981). Richly coloured, large-scale paintings are built up of overlaid layers of gloss paint. In works such as Gangster (1988) he included materials that shine through, so the stretcher construction is visible in the composition or he plays with the grid as a space-defining element as in the painting Weisser Raum.

Behind Polke’s games with contradictions and clichéd ideas, the humorous commentaries and picture puzzles, there is a humanist and culturally critical ethos. The solo show verifies the unbelievable bandwidth of his oeuvre and its formal and thematic diversity.