Polke Post 32 - New release: Katharina Schmidt, Sigmar Polke. Die Reise. 1980–81

POLKE POST 32
New release: Katharina Schmidt, Sigmar Polke. Die Reise. 1980–81

In the recent comprehensive monograph Sigmar Polke. Die Reise 1980–1981, Katharina Schmidt retraces the more than a year-long journey that Sigmar Polke undertook with his partner Britta Zoellner through Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. Drawing on intensive research of archival materials—such as Zoellner’s calendar entries and postcards to family and friends preserved in the Anna Polke Foundation archive—as well as numerous conversations with contemporary witnesses and experts, Schmidt vividly reconstructs the various stages of the journey as well as the travelers’ impressions. With a wealth of knowledge about the locations and their historical contexts, she describes how these experiences affected Sigmar Polke and his artistic practice in the years that followed.

The extent to which the trip informed Polke’s experiments with materials and colors in the 1980s is examined here in detail for the first time. Since the 1980s in particular, his work was marked by exuberant experimentation with unusual materials and techniques. He was not only interested in the contexts associated with the materials—for example, natural dyes, or formerly imperial colors such as cinnabar red or lapis lazuli, as well as synthetic substances rarely used in art like cobalt chloride—but also in the properties of the materials themselves, such as the reactivity of silver compounds with light. The installation Athanor that Sigmar Polke created for the German Pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale—where he won the Golden Lion—was a crucial moment in his work that brought these aspects into a concentrated form. The Anna Polke Foundation has launched the project Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW for 2026, which takes a fresh look at Polke’s installation in collaboration with numerous international partners.

Sigmar Polke, *Athanor*, Installationsansicht, 1986 | © Foto: Udo Dewies, Archiv der Anna Polke-Stiftung

In her book, Katharina Schmidt dedicates an entire chapter to Athanor, which offers a
detailed walkthrough of the installation. She highlights aspects that have received little attention in previous scholarship and illuminates the complex layers of meaning within Polke’s precisely thought-out arrangement of works. In this POLKE POST, we are pleased to share an excerpt of her book discussing the four Farbtafeln. In these paintings, Sigmar Polke used pure pigments, developing an extraordinary painting technique while simultaneously spanning a temporal arc within the installation—from the beginnings of painting to the present.

Rooms on the right

Turning right from the central hall, the viewer’s gaze was drawn through the rear entrance to a constellation dominating the wall: a block of four horizontal monochrome panels assembled into a monumental composition. Hung flush in a grid, their edges formed the axes of a coordinate system: at the top left was Realgar next to Azurit; below them was Malachit to the left and Auripigment to the right. [201]
When geologist Ulrike Stottrop welcomed Sigmar Polke to the mineral collection of the Ruhr Museum in Essen for an informational visit in the run-up to the Biennale, [202] the painter asked to see not only the meteorite that had already been designated for loan and a quartz specimen, but also the minerals he used as pigments in these four paintings—realgar, azurite, malachite, and orpiment. He wanted to learn more about their natural formation, where they were found, and their history. [203] He had already discussed the age of the pigments in telephone conversations with Georg Kremer [Farbmühle Kremer] and expressed the idea that the pigments azurite and malachite might have been among the first colors used by modern painters after the Stone Age. “He probably wanted to situate himself at the very beginning of this modernity with these two pigments. The photochromic pigments in the main hall of the German pavilion thus represented a very modern counterpoint, so to speak. (…) The painter sought to highlight the value and expressive quality of individual colors once forgotten or even forbidden.” [204] In combining these four monochrome panels, Polke was intent on achieving what he described as a “pleasant effect.”

In Essen, he first looked at azurite fused with malachite, which had a particularly intense color. Azurite has been known for 4,500 years, as it occurs in many locations. In Mesopotamia it was crushed into powder and added to glass, while in ancient Egypt the crystal was milled into a deep blue eyeshadow that was especially beloved. It was not until the Renaissance that it started being used more frequently in European painting instead of the expensive lapis lazuli, which was reserved for the most precious parts of the picture. [205] When exposed to air, azurite decomposes into malachite, often forming pseudomorphs, but when stored properly it can remain stable for a long time without developing a greenish tint—even in paintings, depending on the solvent and protective coating. [206| During Polke’s visit to Essen, he also discussed his enthusiasm for malachite, which in nineteenth-century Russia was used for the sumptuous green decoration of entire rooms at the Hermitage, including columns, vases, tables, and a kiosk. He was especially delighted to learn about the popular Russian fairy tale of the “Malachite Box” and the legend that anyone who drinks from a malachite cup can understand the language of animals. [207] Polke also asked to see samples of crystalline realgar and the slightly lighter orpiment. Realgar was known to the Greeks as a poison; in Europe and China, it was used against vermin and was long employed in medicine. For the Romans, it was one of the important commodities traded with Asian countries and Egypt. Despite its toxicity, realgar was valued in Renaissance painting for its intense golden yellow to red-orange color. However, the pigment is not lightfast, and given its high arsenic content it eventually fell out of use in the eighteenth century. [208] Orpiment has been known for just as long. In Greece, it was valued as a brilliant architectural paint, but it also claimed many lives. In art, it was often used as a substitute for expensive gold; alchemists are said to have been interested in it in their search for ways to produce the metal. Later on, orpiment was considered so dangerous that it was ultimately banned. [209] The four high-quality inorganic pigments used by Polke in these monochrome panels are bound with fish glue. [210] Their texture reveals that they were applied in dynamic circular movements that did not entirely conceal the ground. The surfaces at times appear more homogeneous, at others more strongly modulated, creating an overall impression of subdued pulsating energy. Looking back in 1993, Polke himself commented on the overall impression of these paintings: “The color harmony is very consistent in terms of brightness and luminosity. No color stands out. In terms of emotional value, everything is very similar. The harmony that results from the interplay of colors is pleasant, uncontaminated. (…) I contrasted mineral paints with these changing colors, the thermopigments and salt paints, as colors that have a specific duration but also remain. Although, of course, they can also change.”[211] In his arrangement of the four paintings as a block, the sequence of lighter and darker shades seemed to create a subtle torsion that counteracted the static tendency of the large surface. Like Kremer, Hofmeister also recalled that both things could equally be said of Polke: he deliberately used traditional painting materials and had a distinctive understanding of their specific qualities and properties, but at the same time he was clearly positioned in the present, which was manifest in his choice of the latest materials and techniques.

Excerpt from Katharina Schmidt, Sigmar Polke. Die Reise 1980–1981 (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2026).

[201] Sigmar Polke, group of four Farbtafeln, 1985. The individual panels were titled after the pigments used: Realgar, 1985[1] , realgar on cotton fabric, 225 × 300 × 5 cm, private collection; Azurit, azurite on cotton fabric, 225 × 300 × 5 cm, private collection; Malachit, malachite on cotton fabric, 225 × 300 × 5 cm, private collection; Auripigment, orpiment on cotton fabric, 225 × 300 × 5 cm, private collection. In later exhibitions, the four works were also presented side by side in portrait format [illustration in: exhibition catalog, Paris 1988, pp. 86–87]. Cf. Hofmeister 1993, p. 49. See also: exhibition catalog, Zurich 2005, pp. 144/145.
[202] At that time, it was the mineral collection of the Essen-Kupferdreh branch of the Ruhrlandmuseum Essen. See Stottrop, Ulrike: “Polkes Fragen an eine Geologin,” lecture, 31 May 2015, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, video recording. [Many thanks to the Anna Polke Foundation for providing this recording.]
[203] For orpiment and realgar, see notes 31 and 32 above.
[204] Dr. Kremer, email dated 14 February 2022.
[205] Azurite (also mountain blue, copper blue, azure blue, copper glaze, copper carbonate); chemical formula CuCo₃, secondary mineral formed by the weathering of copper ores; it is closely related to malachite, which it chemically transforms into; “Azurite (…) was rarely used as a blue pigment until late antiquity; it is still in use today.” (Lipscher et al. 2022, p. 48.)
Malachite (derived from Latin molochitis and Greek malàche = mallow; also: mountain green, copper green, mineral green) is a basic copper carbonate; chemical formula CuCo₃(OH)₂; weathering product of the mineral azurite; particularly rich deposits in Russia, Africa, and Chile; already known thousands of years ago in China and the Middle East; used in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings as early as the Old Kingdom; used in Europe in sacred fresco painting from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; chemically stable; reacts with sulfur-containing pigments to form black copper sulfide. For azurite and malachite, see: Lipscher et al. 2022, p. 48.
[206] Also based on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azurit (last accessed on 6 June 2022). For orpiment and realgar, see notes 31 and 32 above.
[207] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachit (last accessed on 8 June 2022).
[208] It was also used for removing body hair as well as depilation in tanneries. Based on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realgar (last accessed on 8 June 2022).
[209] Based on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auripigment (last accessed on 6 June 2022).
[210] Thanks to Michael Trier for pointing this out.
[211] Sigmar Polke, quoted in Hofmeister 1993, p. 49.
© for all works by Sigmar Polke: The Estate of Sigmar Polke, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Sigmar Polke. Athanor NOW

As part of Sigmar Polke. Athanor NOW, various projects will address the aspects mentioned here:

Troubling Pigments (After Polke)
An artistic research project led by Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou at the Rijksakademie van Beldenden Kunsten and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, takes a postcolonial perspective on the origins of materials used in European art history, whose use is intertwined with the history of slavery and environmental destruction.

Various formats are also planned at the Ruhr Museum Essen and its mineral collection, the place where Sigmar Polke received essential inspiration for Athanor:

“Is there a stone that smells of death?”, Polke's inspiring visit. Memories of Sigmar Polke by geologist Ulrike Stottrop
Lecture, guided tour, and discussion, June 14, 2026, Mineral Museum, Essen-Kupferdreh

Artistic projects by Evelyn Möcking and Nico Joana Weber at the Ruhr Museum will follow in the second half of the year.

See the full annual program.

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