Sigmar Polke - Pop Art

"Multi-media artist, Sigmar Polke, had the capacity to be at once irreverent, playful, and acerbic. From painting to photography and film to installations and prints, Polke's work, which often incorporated non-traditional materials and techniques, was above all a critique of art itself. Sometimes veiled and sometimes confrontational, the messages conveyed in his work raise serious questions about aesthetic, political, and social conventions. For Polke, the production of art was consistently a dialogue between himself and the viewer, which presented virtually limitless interpretive possibilities. Along with a group of fellow artists that included Gerhard Richter, he introduced the term, Capitalist Realism, which refers loosely to commodity-based art. Further, and specifically in the case of Polke's work, Capitalist Realism constitutes not only a critique of Pop art and the commodification of art and capitalism overall but also of the idealistic and overtly nationalistic Soviet Social Realism that Polke was particularly exposed (and opposed) to.The cynically witty Polke helped launch the Capitalist Realism style as a response to American and British Pop art. Rather than simply commenting on mass production and conspicuous consumption Polke went a step further. With works such as Chocolate Painting, he eliminated signifiers like labels with brand names in order to poke fun at notions of individuality and uniqueness. Indeed, despite the biting commentary of Pop art and its critique of capitalist consumer homogeneity, works like Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans, with their labels and their sameness, still sold for large sums. The objects in Polke's Pop works are stripped of such identifiers, which emphasizes how banal they actually are.At the fore of Polke's experiments was the impulse to challenge virtually every convention of art, often in surprising and ingenious ways. His iconoclastic tendencies extended not merely to content but to the materials of the works themselves, which were often adamantly non-traditional. From uranium and meteorite dust, brightly printed fabric and soot, to bubble wrap and potatoes, Polke's artistic odyssey took him and his work to the potential limits of creation."(theartstory.org)

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke, (born February 13, 1941, Oels, Germany [now Oleśnica, Poland]—died June 10, 2010, Cologne) German artist whose complex and layered paintings played an important role in the resurgence of modern German art.
Polke emigrated with his family from East Germany to West Germany in 1953, settling in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie from 1961 to 1967. His paintings of the 1960s, done in a style known as Capitalist Realism, both mimicked and challenged American Pop art, using recognizable imagery often derived from photography and advertising to invite a more critical social and economic analysis of American capitalism and its ramifications. Polke’s use of paint to replicate the half-tone dot process of newspaper photographic reproduction gave paintings such as Bunnies (1966)—a reference to the byname of the scantily clad hostesses at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs for men—a blurred and dreary quality, ironically causing the women, dressed in sexy costumes, to physically and psychologically disappear from view. Polke began to layer images one atop another, and his interest in pattern led him to use commercially prepared decorative fabrics in the construction of his canvases.

 Polke taught at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg from 1977 to 1991. In the 1980s he and other German artists—including Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, A.R. Penck, and Gerhard Richter—were part of a movement known as Neo-Expressionism, which garnered great attention in the United States. While Polke’s interests, including photography and experimenting with a diverse range of painting materials, led him to eschew a signature style, some works—such as Raised Chair with Geese (1987–88), with its interwoven pictorial references (a rendering of a looming guard tower, line drawings of geese, and printed fabric with a pattern of eyeglasses, folding beach chairs, and folded beach umbrellas)—offered strange and compelling juxtapositions that are both allusive and ambiguous. For his overall contribution to the art of painting, Polke received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize in 2002.(Encyclopædia Britannica) 

 Mixed-Media

Mixed-Media Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer.

Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years of his life, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.Wikipedia

In 1963, Polke founded the painting movement "Kapitalistischer Realismus"[4] ("Capitalist realism") with Gerhard Richter[5] and Konrad Fischer (alias Konrad Lueg as artist). It is an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as "Socialist Realism", then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union and its satellites (from one which he had fled with his family), but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art "doctrine" of western capitalism. He also participated in "Demonstrative Ausstellung", a store-front exhibition in Düsseldorf with Manfred Kuttner, Lueg, and Richter. Essentially a self-taught photographer, Polke spent the next three years painting, experimenting with filmmaking and performance art.Wikipedia

Mixed-Media