Mateusz Sapija is a researcher and curator. He graduated from UCL Qatar MA in Museum Studies and the Goldsmiths College MFA Curating. He works on a PhD in History of Art at the Edinburgh College of Art, titled The Rise of Post-Democracy in Contemporary European Art. Currently, he is a DAAD Doctoral Fellow at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science - LMU Munich. He worked with numerous art institutions and projects – such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Asakusa (Tokyo), Sharjah Biennale 12 or documenta 14 – being engaged in roles related to research, curating and public programming.
Scholarship 2022 - Mateusz Sapija, Inside and outside of East and West. Sigmar Polke und Eastern Europe
Mateusz Sapija, Inside and outside of East and West. Sigmar Polke und Eastern Europe
Born as a Silesian in Oels, Polke at the age of four, along with his family, fled the now-Polish town during German expulsion towards Soviet-occupied East Germany. He relocated to West Germany eight years after and has remained there ever since. Although his roots are reaching to what is now Poland, Polke’s oeuvre is usually discussed in the context of the Western hemisphere. At the same time, his relationship with Eastern Europe is still under-explored.
Although he was still a youngster when he departed the East for the West, Polke was mature enough to understand the unstable reality and post-war struggles defining the Eastern bloc. His arrival in West Germany was the arrival to the reality of a tremendous socio-political and economic advancement of the late-1950s defined by the Wirtschaftswunder – an economic phenomenon important not only to the country’s financial prosperity but also to the rebuilding of the national identity. Polke remained calmly distant to this paradigm, which may be proven by his often-repeated words: “When I came to the West I saw many, many things for the first time. But I also saw the prosperity of the West critically. It wasn't really Heaven. (…) This attitude— looking at what is happening from a point of view outside—is still part of my work.”[1] As not only an outsider but also a notoriously reclusive personality, Polke resisted participating in the explanation of his work and strongly protected his personal life. Thus, the interpretation and history of Polke’s oeuvre was mostly constructed by the artworld, which positioned him in the Western Hemisphere context, mainly due to the Cold War attitude and its long-lasting legacy impacting the art historical thinking. Examining these developments in Polke’s personal and artistic history on the one hand, while aiming to respond to the lack of his work analysis from this angle on the other hand, this research aims to examine and rediscover the connection between Polke and Eastern Europe through in-depth archival research and literature review.
In its second strand, the research will pursue an exploration of Polke’s influence on Eastern European artistic production, which occurred both directly, towards artists and groups whom encountered Polke or exhibited in the same exhibitions, or indirectly, as a result of his seminal practice and formative approach towards the media of painting. A survey of present scholarship manifests that although there have been research projects of artistic exchanges occurring between Eastern and Western Germany and Europe, these have not impacted the main discourse. This claim may be further strengthened in the context of cultural politics relaxation occurring since Erich Honecker’s tenure in 1971, and especially after the Basic Treaty between East and West Germany in 1973 when the East German artists started to regularly travel to Western Europe. Thus, while the Berlin Wall did make the travel to the West more challenging, it did not stop Eastern Europeans from doing so, nor did it prevent Eastern European art from being exhibited. Several examples demonstrate Polke's seminal influence on Eastern European art, but also a complex set of relations and attitudes towards his legacy. Their further exploration, pursued by this project via interviews with Eastern European artists, will primarily establish a yet non-explored perspective on Polke and re-examine his work in the context of Europe's revised artistic geography and the continent's revaluated centre-periphery relations.
[1] Sigmar Polke in Martin Gayford, A Weird Intelligence. Modern Painters 16, no. 4 (2004), pp. 78–85, p. 78.