Three Pallet Trucks and a Sheet of Paper – The Neues Museum Nürnberg realized an exhibition under the above title, showing a selection of works from Edition Block’s program (February 10, 2023–February 25, 2024). In 1964, René Block, still an art student himself at the time, opened his gallery in West Berlin, with a show of so-called Capitalist Realism works (Neodada, Pop, Décollage, Kapitalistischer Realismus, including works by KP Brehmer, K.H. Hödicke, Herbert Kaufmann, Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Siegmund Lympasik, Sigmar Polke, Lothar Quinte, Gerhard Richter, and Wolf Vostell).
Polke Post 19 - Three Pallet Trucks and a Sheet of Paper. A conversation with René Block
POLKE POST 19
Three Pallet Trucks and a Sheet of Paper. A conversation with René Block
In an interview with Anna Polke, René Block talked about the term Capitalist Realism, the beginnings of his gallery, and becoming acquainted with Sigmar Polke:
“As we later found out, Sigmar and I had done an apprenticeship as glass painters during the same time, at the same company, but in different places. That was a very funny discovery! So, having done an apprenticeship as a glass painter, I attended the school of applied arts in Krefeld and then, to avoid military service, went to Berlin and continued to study glass painting at art college here. During that time, I had an apartment including space for a store, here in Berlin, and was thinking about what I could do with the store at the front. And the most obvious thing to do was to exhibit the works of my fellow students there, that is, to turn it into an exhibition space, a gallery […].
The happening took place in Aachen on July 20, 1964 at the Technische Hochschule, which included such artists as Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Henning Christiansen, Robert Filliou, and Stanley Brouwn. I wasn’t there but read about it and thought: ‘That’s actually something I’d like to get into.’ That is, the area where art leaves the wall. I wrote to Wolf Vostell and he initially acted as a liaison to what we now call Fluxus. At the same time, I had come across paintings by Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg at a Künstlerbund exhibition here. And it became very clear to me that if I was going to open a gallery, then it would be important to offer this generation of artists a forum. They were still very young back then, older than me, but very young. Both Richter and Lueg were interested in getting really involved in Berlin. Both wrote to me, independently of each other, saying that I absolutely had to visit an artist by the name of Sigmar Polke the next time I was in Düsseldorf, that he should be part of all this too. So, on my next visit to Düsseldorf I visited Sigmar Polke. He was a master student and had a studio at the Kunstakademie. We actually had a pretty good rapport straight away. He agreed to lend two paintings to the very first exhibition, which was to take place that September [1964]. That’s how it all started. […] We were both inexperienced. Sigmar was inexperienced in dealing with people running a gallery, an exhibition space. And I was inexperienced in dealing with artists, which meant approaching each other in a rather awkward way. Of course, it all then happened via the paintings that were in the studio and that we looked at. You can then start a conversation and lose any mutual timidity and over-respectfulness. But it was a bit absurd at first, because we were addressing each other as ‘Herr Polke’ and ‘Herr Block.’ The first letters were like that: ‘Dear Herr Polke,’ ‘Dear Herr Block.’ […]
What interested me about Polke was the same as with Richter or Lueg, namely that they all brought a new approach to realist painting, a new way of addressing reality in painting, our daily encounters with newspapers, media, news, and so on. That is, they brought, in a way, everyday life into the paintings. It was during the time when the official art in Germany was abstract painting and Tachism. That’s what artists were doing and what you’d see. And then suddenly there were younger people doing something completely different, producing very cheeky imagery actually. And that really interested me.
I then learned via encounters with the artists, also with Sigmar, about the Demonstration für den Kapitalistischen Realismus (Demonstration for Capitalist Realism), which was a term that captivated me from the start. I then, for a while, made this label part of the gallery program in Berlin: Images of Capitalist Realism. The very first exhibition was called Neodada, Pop, Décollage, Kapitalistischer Realismus, because we didn’t really know what to call it. It wasn’t Pop in the American, or English, sense. It wasn’t Nouveau Realisme in the French sense; it was suddenly this label, Capitalist Realism, that seemed very important and appropriate to these particular artists. What also interested me about the term Capitalist Realism was that here in Berlin we were surrounded by Socialist Realism and we wanted to counter this not very artistic, as we thought of it at the time, boring Socialist Realism with something that had a different dynamic and power, and which was saying something different about our times. In addition, of course, there was the fact that Gerhard Richter came from Dresden and that Sigmar, as a child, had also come to Düsseldorf from the East. […]
It was supposed to be a demonstration against Berlin’s cultural scene. I grew up in Krefeld at a time when Haus Lange was an important avant-garde museum. Paul Wember was exhibiting artists like Arman, Yves Klein, Tinguely, Rauschenberg, Burri, and so on. When I came to Berlin, I missed that and asked myself: ‘Where are these things?’ There was nothing. And that was actually the gallery’s aim: if we do something here, then we want to try to puncture this smooth, this beautiful balloon.”
Excerpt from an interview by Anna Polke with René Block from the archive of the Anna Polke Foundation, recorded on January 8, 2020. The transcript of the conversation has been edited for the purposes of publication.