Research & Projects

ORAL ART HISTORY

The Anna Polke Foundation conducts a long-term oral art history project that documents the voices, impressions, and stories of Sigmar Polke’s companions, friends and contemporaries. The research that has been done up to now in the form of publications, conferences and exhibitions will be supplemented by personal reports and enhanced by additional perspectives. The resulting audio/video archive will provide a more comprehensive view of Sigmar Polke’s work and of contemporary history. The material is available to researchers, excerpts are to be published successively.

In this context, we recommend visiting the oral art history initiative Audioarchiv Kunst and the research project Café Deutschland at the Städel Museum.

PUBLICATIONS

On the occasion of the anniversary project Productive Image Interference two books were published:

Productive Image Interference: Sigmar Polke and Artistic Perspectives Today. Exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2021 (DISTANZ)

Reader: Productive Image Interference. Sigmar Polke und Current Perspectives. 2023 (DISTANZ)

A series of publications is currently in planning. The first edition will be published in 2024.

Archive

Over the years Anna Polke has collected exhibition catalogues, monographs and newspaper articles and transferred them to the Foundation. She also donated personal documents, such as letters and records of her father, to the Foundation's archive. In the long term, the Anna Polke Foundation's archive is to be used to collect comprehensive publications, materials and relevant information on Sigmar Polke and make them available to interested parties for research purposes. We look forward to receiving donations in kind (catalogues, documents, etc.) for the further development of the Foundation's archive.