Research & Projects – Anna Polke Stiftung

NACHSTELLUNG / REENACTMENT

NACHSTELLUNG. Man sollte eine Gruppe gründen / REENACTMENT. We should form a group
KONSORTIUM (Lars Breuer, Sebastian Freytag, Guido Münch)

A project by the Anna Polke Foundation with the Von der Heydt Museum

Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, June 7–July 6, 2025
Opening: June 6, 2025, 6pm

“We should form a group,” demanded Konrad Lueg in an appeal to his fellow students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1963. Shortly afterwards, he organized an exhibition with Manfred Kuttner, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter in a vacant store—the start of several collaborative actions. In February 1964, the four artists took a selection of their works from the art academy to the renowned Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. They set up a presentation for gallery owner Rolf Jährling in the front garden of the villa, placing their pictures in the snow, leaning them against garden fences and protruding walls or hanging them on bushes and trees. That same year, Lueg, Polke, and Richter were invited to participate in a group exhibition (Neue Realisten, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, 1964/65). The four artists, whose careers took very different paths, parted ways soon afterwards.

In a film installation conceived for the Von der Heydt Museum, the artist group KONSORTIUM examines this unconventional action that went down in art history as the Vorgartenausstellung (Front Garden Exhibition). Using historical photos and documents relating to Galerie Parnass from the ZADIK archives and the artists’ estates, the group has reconstructed this now legendary action and explored the history of its reception, all while addressing issues concerning artists then and now: cooperation and competition, career strategies, individual circumstances, interests and decisions, and the mechanisms of the art world. KONSORTIUM builds a bridge between past and present that highlights the factors influencing artistic work and art history.

KONSORTIUM was founded as an exhibition space in Düsseldorf in 2004. Since 2008, the three artists Lars Breuer (b. 1974, lives in Cologne), Sebastian Freytag (b. 1978, lives in Cologne), and Guido Münch (b. 1966, lives in Düsseldorf) have been working as an artist collective under the name KONSORTIUM.

The exhibition was initiated by the Anna Polke Foundation and organized with the Von der Heydt Museum. The project is accompanied by a cooperation with the ZADIK | Central Archive for German and International Art Market Studies and a seminar at the University of Cologne.

Supported by:

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.

ANNIVERSARY PROJECT 2021/22

PRODUCTIVE IMAGE INTERFERENCE: SIGMAR POLKE AND ARTISTIC PERSPECTIVES TODAY

An Anniversary Project by the Anna Polke Foundation to mark the 80th anniversary Sigmar Polke's birth, under the patronage of Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, Minister of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Fake news with manipulated images (even in high resolution), virtual reality, an infinite cosmos of increasingly widespread JPEG and GIF images: we have long lived with the awareness that we cannot trust our eyes and that pictures, whether produced manually or technically, do not so much depict reality as shape it – including transmission errors, degradation of quality, hacks, and other forms of interference. When Sigmar Polke was a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1960s, his interest quickly turned to images of his time that were widely disseminated in the mass media. The transmission, interference, the transformation, and recoding of these images, including their resulting or revealed errors, became a motif and early trademark in his raster dot paintings.

Based on current research, which regards Sigmar Polke as a universal contemporary and a postmodern artist’s artist who makes use of a wide variety of visual and temporal contexts, the exhibition focuses for the first time on a specific approach that characterizes Polke’s oeuvre. Polke’s technique, his handling of different media, contexts, and materials, relies on the potential of the supposedly flawed, blurred, and mutable. His works play with the pleasure of the illusion of images and in so doing question the effectiveness of (manipulated) images in different ways and various media. This productive interference of images is also a central strategy for a current generation of artists. The selected works by contemporary international artists show new techniques and methods that illustrate how forms of visual interference remain a productive starting point for creative work today in the negotiation of cultural and political issues.

EXHIBITION
Productive Image Interference: Sigmar Polke and Artistic Perspectives Today
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, November 13, 2021–March 6, 2022
with Kerstin Brätsch, Phoebe Collings-James, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Trevor Paglen, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Max Schulze, Avery Singer
Curated by Kathrin Barutzki and Nelly Gawellek (both Anna Polke Foundation) with Gregor Jansen (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf)

FESTIVAL
Online festival with contributions by: Taslima Ahmed, Bice Curiger, Raphael Hefti, Camille Henrot, Alexander Kluge, Doreen Mende, Magnus Schäfer, students of the class of Marxt (formerly Odenbach) and others
www.festival-anna-polke-stiftung.com

On the occasion of the anniversary project two books were published: