Polke Post 10 appears on 13 February 2021. This is a special date for us and for you: today Sigmar Polke would have turned 80. So we are popping corks and commemorating his life and work with Sekt für Alle (Champagne for all), lots of confetti and this virtual greeting.
Polke Post 10 - Sigmar Polke's 80th birthday
POLKE POST 10
Sigmar Polke's 80th birthday
Even before he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to study art in 1961, Sigmar Polke had formative experiences that were closely entwined with Germany’s wartime and post-war history. The seventh child of the architect Hermann Polke and the artistically gifted Hanna, née Raschdorf, he was born in 1941 during the Second World War. Hanna’s sister Else Raschdorf, with whom Sigmar had a close relationship, also belonged to the Polke extended family. As a child and adolescent, Sigmar Polke experienced the family’s flight, first in 1945 from Oels (Silesia) to Thuringia and a few years later, in 1953, from the still young GDR to Düsseldorf, where the large family was reunited. There, in 1959, the young Sigmar was sent to apprentice at the Derix glass-painting workshop, where he met his first wife Karin, née Raddatz. In 1960 their son Georg was born, and in 1964 their daughter Anna. Sigmar studied at the Kunstakademie and Karin worked in the legendary pubs Creamcheese and Domino. Fellow artists such as Blinky Palermo, Katharina Sieverding and Imi Knoebel were regular guests in the flat on Kirchfeldstraße. The Düsseldorf art scene as well as the political and social events of the ‘economic miracle’ years and the Adenauer era, and later the process of engaging with the National Socialist past initiated by a political young generation, also had an impact on the young artist Sigmar Polke. But in retrospect it is remarkable how open his work always remained.
“When I think of Sigmar Polke, I think of an artist who was able to shape transgressions as contexts. […] The artist Paul Chan unquestionably says it best when he views Polke’s work as a reminder of ‘how precious and formative transgressions are.’”
– Dr. des. Dirk Hildebrandt, research associate at the University of Cologne and Anna Polke
"Sigmar Polke always understood how to go beyond national discourses, to play with stereotypes and preconceptions about ‘German art’. For me, his work embodies an enjoyment of the painting process and precise observation, articulated through a keen sense of the hidden and unseen – just think, for example, of his photographs of homeless people. Polke’s work has lost none of its topicality: At a time when nationalisms and simplistic discourses are resurfacing, Polke stands for a polysemantic, experimental art in which humour and self-irony serve as escape routes defying all attempts at categorization.”
– Dr. Julie Sissia, art scholar and Anna Polke Foundation Fellow 2019
Sigmar Polke was first and foremost concerned with art. Current headlines may have given him impetus, but the impulses the world provided him with were far more diverse, going all the way back to prehistory and early history, from his art-historical predecessors in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (above all the German hero Albrecht Dürer, whom he appropriated for himself with a wink and a few rubber bands) and modernity to the mythology and materiality of colours.
"As an art historian my research interest is actually in the art of the early modern period, yet it led me to Sigmar Polke. By occupying myself and engaging with his work, I have asked myself new questions that also relate to older art. Many complex themes and issues that have preoccupied artists for centuries are present in Polke’s work. At the same time, he is very much anchored in his time: characteristics and traumas of the German post-war period are always recognizable in Polke’s works. The present and the supra-temporal meet in his work.”
– Ksenija Tschetschik-Hammerl, art historian and Anna Polke Foundation scholarship holder 2020
“Sigmar Polke’s works are products of their time that record the ups, downs and abysses of the political, social and cultural climate of the Federal Republic (which was just a few years younger than Polke himself) like sensitive measuring instruments. At the same time, they form nodal points in a web of images, ideas and references that continues to branch out, creating new connections in the present that might not have been conceivable when the works were created fifteen, twenty, or fifty years ago. Polke never stopped experimenting and questioning established truths in his images, the result of a critical inquisitiveness that can also provide models for dealing with the current flood of digital images.”
– Magnus Schäfer, author and curator, Anna Polke Foundation scholarship holder 2020
Polke’s universal, non-hierarchical, curious spirit of discovery keeps his work alive and awake to this day.
Capitalist realist, alchemist, ironist – Polke was all of these things, and yet not. It has almost become a cliché that Polke did not allow anything to be ascribed to him. He didn’t even want to commit himself to one medium, instead experimenting in all fields. The fact that Polke’s work still inspires his contemporaries as well as a young generation of scientists and artists today, more than ten years after his death, is evidenced by statements made by our Fellows which we collected on the occasion of the anniversary.
For our work, the anniversary has for a while now been an occasion to ask what it is that actually keeps Polke’s work so current and relevant in 2021.
We intend to address this question in several events in the anniversary year 2021 and shed new light on Polke’s work, above all in our anniversary project Productive Image Interference, consisting of an exhibition in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and an international festival lasting several days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Both events will bring Polke’s work together with current artistic as well as theoretical positions, and reassess it from today’s perspective.
The transmission and disruption, the transformation and recoding of these images, including the resulting or revealed image errors, became a motif and early trademark in his raster dot paintings.
But this productive image interference did not end with Capitalist Realism, which Polke proclaimed in 1963 together with Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner and Konrad Lueg, and their engagement with the pictorial worlds of the period of the economic miracle, but remained a central instrument and motif in Polke’s oeuvre, in which everything could become artistic material, including his own drawings, which years later landed on the photocopier, were shifted back and forth, and reactivated.
In view of current technological developments, it is not surprising that the confrontation with an exponentially growing continuum of images, contexts and time streams also continues to drive a current generation of artists. For us, therefore, Productive Image Interference is a key to making Polke’s work readable today and provides an explanation for the fact that Polke, with his urge to push the respective media and images available to him to their limits and beyond, is regarded as an artists’ artist who continues to have a strong influence on current art production, whether directly or indirectly.
The combination and juxtaposition of Polke’s works with current artistic and theoretical positions clearly shows affinities and parallels, just as it reveals differences and further developments. Image Interference becomes an anchor here, where history and the present, fact and fiction become entangled and potential emerges that not only Polke, but also a subsequent generation has recognized for itself. The current positions around Polke address this complex interplay of (changed and ever-changing) images and their relation to the world, to what is now – after and concurrently with Polke – and to what may still be to come.
EXHIBITION
Productive Image Interference. Sigmar Polke and Current Artistic Positions
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 13 November 2021–6 Feburary 2022
Participating artists: Kerstin Brätsch, Phoebe Collings-James, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Trevor Paglen, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Max Schulze, Avery Singer
Curated by Kathrin Barutzki, Nelly Gawellek and Gregor Jansen
FESTIVAL
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, 25–27 November 2021
Participants (among others): Bice Curiger, Arthur Fink, Nina Gerlach, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Petra Lange-Berndt, Students of the Class of Marcel Odenbach, Magnus Schäfer, Michael Trier