Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW
For 2026, the Anna Polke Foundation is initiating the international research and education project Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW, which involves numerous collateral projects and event formats that will be realized at various locations throughout the year. Taking Sigmar Polke’s celebrated Athanor installation in the German Pavilion at the XLII Venice Biennale in 1986 as a starting point, new perspectives on Polke’s work will be developed on the basis of current discourses forty years later. The project is decentralized and interdisciplinary and will be implemented with academic and field-based cooperation partners.
Athanor—the site-specific ensemble of works that gave the project its title—earned Sigmar Polke the Golden Lion in 1986 and subsequently also the label of the alchemist artist. In it, the entire Polke cosmos is revealed: The artist not only presented highly diverse works from his painterly oeuvre, demonstrating its extreme range, but also worked directly in situ, applying a paint containing salt to the wall of the pavilion’s conch that changed color depending on the humidity in the lagoon city. He also had a hole cut into the wall, into which he inserted a piece of cinnabar, and placed a meteorite and a rock crystal between his works. These included six large abstract lacquer paintings created for the Biennale, which were perceived as huge mirror images in which the visitors saw themselves. Natural pigments, earth colors, synthetically produced, sometimes toxic substances, varnishes, and resins—the abundance of materials used reveals the great pleasure Polke derived from experimenting with a wide variety of substances, image carriers, motifs, and objects in equal measure. With the title Athanor, named after the alchemist’s furnace, Polke found a complex and versatile form that allowed him to combine his painting with architecture and mineral objects in a way that demonstrates his unconventional, reflective, and simultaneously non-hierarchical approach to materials, colors, and media.
Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW takes up diverse aspects of this historical constellation of works and links them to our present. To this end, scholarships and research projects will be awarded to encourage academics from various disciplines and artists to explore topical questions about Sigmar Polke’s work. These are intended to expand the previous alchemical reading of Polke as an experimenting, exploratory artist and provide new perspectives on the materials, objects, and media used, for example by examining the works’ contextual meanings, political and social implications, and transformational and performative aspects of the installation as a coherent, dynamic assemblage.
Cooperation partners include: De Pont Museum, Tilburg; Department of Art History at the University of Cologne; master’s program in Art Education and Cultural Management at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf; Institute of History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Literature at the Technische Universität Berlin; Berlin University of the Arts; Institute of Art Studies, Braunschweig University of Art; Art History seminar at the University of Hamburg; Academy of Fine Arts, Munich; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen | Pinakothek der Moderne; Central Institute of Art History Munich; EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, Freie Universität Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.
Two scholarships for 2025 have just been announced.
A call for projects will be published in May 2025.
If you have any questions about the project, please contact Dr. Kathrin Barutzki, head of the project, at barutzki@anna-polke-stiftung.com.