Sigmar Polke
22 Jun - 07 Oct 2007
Zwei Köpfe, Kartoffelköppe (Mao & LBJ), 1965, Kunstharz auf Leinwand, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden © Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke
A Retrospective
22.06.–07.10.07
With Sigmar Polke – A Retrospective MUMOK is presenting one of the most important contemporary artists who, since the 60’s, has been counted amongst those pioneering the resurgence of painting. The retrospective brings together works from the Frieder Burda, Josef Froehlich and Reiner Speck collections and is one of the world-wide biggest Polke exhibitions of recent years. 60 large-scale pictures and more than 110 works on paper substantiate the thematic diversity and pluralism of style of the artist who was born in 1941 in East Silesia and who now lives in Cologne.
In 1963, while still a student of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art Polke started 'capitalist realism' along Gerhard Richter and other artists. It was critically concerned with 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 paper or monumentalised them ironically in panels. The so-called 'fabric and half-tone screen pictures' became a trade mark in the late 1960’s. With an ironic distance he directed his attention to the dreams and promises of the blossoming
consumer and leisure society.
At the same time Polke turned to mass media image production: he painted using copies of printed models and transferred enlarged newspaper photographs onto canvas where the half-tone grid dots developed into independent ornaments and thus point up socio-cultural and mediadetermined technical fundamentals of the picture’s content.
Over the years Polke expanded his pictorial language with a multitude of new stylistic, formal and content-related aspects. Gloss paint works, poured paintings and unusual painting materials and techniques characterise his works since the 1980’s when he began to experiment with untried pigments, minerals and chemicals. Polke’s games with contradictions and clichéd ideas, his humorous commentaries and picture puzzles are always based on a humanist and culturally critical ethos.
Curator
Edelbert Köb
A Retrospective
22.06.–07.10.07
With Sigmar Polke – A Retrospective MUMOK is presenting one of the most important contemporary artists who, since the 60’s, has been counted amongst those pioneering the resurgence of painting. The retrospective brings together works from the Frieder Burda, Josef Froehlich and Reiner Speck collections and is one of the world-wide biggest Polke exhibitions of recent years. 60 large-scale pictures and more than 110 works on paper substantiate the thematic diversity and pluralism of style of the artist who was born in 1941 in East Silesia and who now lives in Cologne.
In 1963, while still a student of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art Polke started 'capitalist realism' along Gerhard Richter and other artists. It was critically concerned with 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 paper or monumentalised them ironically in panels. The so-called 'fabric and half-tone screen pictures' became a trade mark in the late 1960’s. With an ironic distance he directed his attention to the dreams and promises of the blossoming
consumer and leisure society.
At the same time Polke turned to mass media image production: he painted using copies of printed models and transferred enlarged newspaper photographs onto canvas where the half-tone grid dots developed into independent ornaments and thus point up socio-cultural and mediadetermined technical fundamentals of the picture’s content.
Over the years Polke expanded his pictorial language with a multitude of new stylistic, formal and content-related aspects. Gloss paint works, poured paintings and unusual painting materials and techniques characterise his works since the 1980’s when he began to experiment with untried pigments, minerals and chemicals. Polke’s games with contradictions and clichéd ideas, his humorous commentaries and picture puzzles are always based on a humanist and culturally critical ethos.
Curator
Edelbert Köb