40 years after the celebrated presentation of Sigmar Polke’s Athanor installation in the German Pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale, Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW reactivates this now-iconic constellation of works from current artistic and scholarly perspectives. The program focuses on topics such as ecology, alchemy, materiality, politics, and technology.
On the occasion of the anniversary of Sigmar Polke‘s Athanor installation in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1986, the Anna Polke Foundation in Cologne is initiating an international, decentralized, and interdisciplinary research and education project. Under the direction of Dr. Kathrin Barutzki (Anna Polke Foundation) and in cooperation with numerous project partners worldwide Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW reactivates this now-iconic constellation of works—named after the alchemical furnace intended to yield the philosopher’s stone via transformations of matter—current artistic and scholarly perspectives. The program focuses on topics such as ecology, alchemy, materiality, politics, and technology.
In offering a fresh perspective on the particularly productive phase during the 1980s, the project expands the artist’s reception as an alchemist. Artists and researchers from various disciplines will pick up on aspects of the historical constellation of Polke works and connect his engagement with diverse contexts and materials to current issues in practice and theory. Culture-historical approaches will thus be enriched by perspectives from literature and philosophy, the digital humanities, and the natural and technical sciences.
Through a major solo exhibition at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, a summer school and numerous formats—including guided tours and collection interventions, university courses and workshops, educational programs, podcasts and digital offerings—the international year-long program reactivates works from the multilayered installation and related pieces within contemporary contexts. Situated between scholarly research, artistic interaction, and public discourse, Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW traces the influences emanating from Polke’s thinking and making, which—forty years after the presentation in Venice—acquire relevance today in the form of new constellations.
For further information please visit the program website.
Project Team
Dr. Kathrin Barutzki, Head of Research
barutzki@anna-polke-stiftung.com
Elsa Wellmann-Gilcher, Research Associate and Project Assistant
wellmann-gilcher@anna-polke-stiftung.com
We thank the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation, Zurich, for the generous support of the project.