Everything about Sigmar Polke totally explained
Sigmar Polke (born
February 13 1941) is a
German post-modern painter and
photographer.
Life and works
Polke was born in
Oels in
Lower Silesia. He fled with his family to
Thuringia in 1945 during the
Expulsion of Germans after World War II. His family escaped from the
Communist regime in
East Germany in 1953, traveling first to
West Berlin and then to
Düsseldorf.
Upon his arrival in
West Germany, in
Wittich, Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a
stained glass factory called Dusseldorf Kaiserswerth, before entering the
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Art School) at age twenty. From 1961-1967 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under
Karl Otto Goetz and
Gerhard Hoehme and began his creative output during a time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere. During the 1960's,Düsseldorf, in particular, was a prosperous, commercial city and an important center of artistic activity.
In 1963 Polke founded “Kapitalistischen Realismus” (Capitalistic Realism), a painting movement with
Gerhard Richter and
Konrad Lueg (later called
Konrad Fischer). It is an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand 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 (from which he'd 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 Kuttner, Lueg, and Richter.
Polke's creative output during this time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere, demonstrate most vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and subversive approach in his drawings, watercolors, and gouaches produced during the 1960's and 1970's. Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions.
The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed, was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary.
Paganini, an expression of "the difficulty of purging the demons of
Nazism" - witness the "hidden"
swastikas - is typical of Polke's tendency to accumulate a range of different mediums within one canvas. It isn't unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils.
Polke embarked on a series of world travels throughout the 1970s, photographing in
Pakistan,
Paris,
New York,
Afghanistan, and
Brazil. From 1977-1991 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts,
Hamburg. He settled in
Cologne, where he continues to live and work.
In 2007, Vienna's Museum Moderner Kunst held an exhibition of Polke's work entitled, "Sigmar Polke: Retrospektive" that spanned his career from his appropriations of Pop imagery and continuing through decades of perplexing compositions and clever critiques to arrive at current works that employ a haze of chemicals, minerals, and paints.
Notes and References
Recognition
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sigmar Polke'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://sigmar_polke.totallyexplained.com">Sigmar Polke Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
