Polke, Sigmar

Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs, and Films

Imaginitive, subtle, bold, playful, pointed, witty, explosive, narrative, open, hermetic, mysterious, expressive, wild, ironic, joyous, cynical, ambiguous, mythologizing, and fantastical. How else to characterize Sigmar Polke's astonishing, incredibly pleasurable, and stylistically all-embracing oeuvre? Starting from the profane material of everyday culture, Polke interprets images of reality rather than reality itself, satirizes tendencies in contemporary painting, quesitons the role of the artist as author, breaks down the trivial visual worlds of media photography, and always, but always, takes off on the most magnificent flights of imagination. This publication is the most complete monograph on the artist to date, and includes a number of works never before published.

Sigmar Polke: Miracle of Siegen, The Lens Paintings/ Wunder Von Siegen, Die Linsenbilder

Sigmar Polke (born 1941) has been experimenting for more than 40 years with different styles and subject matter as well as with a variety of materials and techniques. His creative diversity is demonstrated powerfully in the new group of works presented in this book, the so-called ‘lenticular pictures’, or lens paintings. Polke applies a layer of structure gel, usually used to thicken acrylic paint, to a previously painted picture and then slides a saw-toothed scraper over the surface, to which he later adds more paint. The resulting works have an unexpected three-dimensional quality, providing the viewer with different images according to the angle from which the painting is viewed. Photographs showing the paintings in progress – all specially selected for the book by Polke – reveal the artist’s idiosyncratic use of surface, his application of colour and his subtly humorous way of combining abstraction and realism.

Sigmar Polke: History of Everything, Paintings and Drawings 1998-2003

No artist has come up with anything to match History of Everything, Sigmar Polke's profound response to the age of Osama bin Laden, and this book does a flawless job of illuminating his headspinningly bold associative leaps. Solid reproductions and remarkably lucid essays by art star Dave Hickey and cocurator Chalres Wylie guide us through what obviously was a knockout show at the Dallas and Tate museums. Known as Richter's rival, Germany's abominable shaman spinning variations on Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, and benday-dot painter Lichtenstein, Polke makes more than mischief and "Polke dots" here: it adds up to a masterpiece.

The central image comes from a newspaper diagram of a spy satellite relaying the image of Al Qaida fleeing on horseback to CIA and RAF HQ and the US Army in Afghanistan. The picture rhymes with two 19th-century engravings, one showing a uniformed Frenchman astride a deer on a platform attached to a balloon, the other a German whose balloon is guided by eagles hitched up like horses. Today, machinery has displaced flesh: the steeds are earthbound, the balloons and eagles replaced by Predator drones, the balloonist's eyes with cameras and mechanical imagemaking. The halftone reduces the Al Qaida horsemen to a cartoon, then a still tinier inkblot. In his huge abstract painting I Live in My Own World, But It's Ok, They Knew Me Here, Polke further simplifies them into a blotch that resembles a flaw in a halftone, a mechanical artifact. It's all about patterns: in a painting of a halftone of a cowboy checking out a target, says Dickey, "the circular shape of the buckshot p! ellet, the pattern of circular holes the pellets make in the target, and the benday dots that constitute their photo representation flash back and forth in our perception in such a way that shooting guns, shooting pictures, and looking at pictures are proposed as analogous activities." This book teaches you a new way to see. –Tim Appelo

Sigmar Polke is one of the world's most revered and influential contemporary artists. This handsome book documents Polke's recent work, which continues and deepens the artist's famed explorations of how images are made, used, and thought about in our media-dominated culture. The works also pose intriguing questions about how the eye and mind become crucial players in the perceptual game we undertake daily. Using topical subject matter-such as the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and the Middle East and the everyday presence of guns in American life-both for its inherent content and metaphoric possibilities, Polke has created a cohesively thematic yet ingeniously diverse group of monumental paintings and large-scale drawings. The source materials for these images are often drawn from American and European newspapers, magazines, and books. All of this work by Polke reflects a fiercely intelligent yet remarkably accessible interpretation of how we perceive and misperceive the social, political, and aesthetic worlds that we live in. In the text, Charles Wylie discusses how Polke's recent work presents a coherent visual essay on the literal and symbolic construction of images. Noted art critic Dave Hickey provides an interpretive essay on the artist and these new works. Both essays are interspersed with a valuable compendium of Polke's source materials.

Sigmar Polke: Photoworks : When Pictures Vanish

Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish

Sigmar Polke: Druckfehler, 1996-98

Sigmar Polke: The Editioned Works 1963-2000

Artwork by Sigmar Polke. Edited by Claus von der Osten, Martin Hentschel. Text by Jurgen Becker.

Sigmar Polke: Photographs 1969-1974

Although he's best known as a painter, an inveterate experimenter whose trademark style is never to settle on a style, Sigmar Polke has been taking and printing photographs throughout his career--or in some cases taking photographs and setting the film aside until he had enough money to print them. Polke studied painting at the Dsseldorf Kunstakademie, and in the lean years after his 1968 graduation, made thousands of images on that system. This boxed limited edition includes 32 unbound, loose tritones and a 41-page softcover book on his photographs from 1969 to 1974.

Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper

Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper, 1963-1974 accompanies the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of drawings, watercolors, and gouaches by this famous German painter. Polke's works on paper are beautiful and funny with strong tinges of emotion. Potato Heads: Nixon and Khrushchev, from 1965, is a colorful watercolor line drawing of two world leaders with bulbous heads and green polka dots. His almost-comic-book style can be both sweet, as in Young Peas, an image from 1963 with quickly drawn circles, and unnerving--an untitled gouache from 1965 depicts a ghostly figure and a swastika. Polke was born at the end of WWII and came of artistic age at a time when Germany was undergoing major cultural changes. It was during this period of the 1960s that abstract expressionism was taking over the art scene, yet Polke was committing himself to "an idiom that was crude and humorous, its images outrageous, its content seemingly trivial, and its social message obvious although ambivalent." His drawings from this era highlight his interests in culture, politics, and urban life more obviously than his later paintings, photographs, and screen printings. Also included in the catalog are images from Polke's sketchbook and essays by Michael Semff, Bice Curiger, and Margit Rowell. This book is a wonderful opportunity to explore Polke's early art, and it marks the first time that his works on paper have been shown together. --Jennifer Cohen

200 pages, 326 illustrations including 299 in color.

ne of the most significant artists of his generation, Sigmar Polke came of age creatively around 1963 in Dsseldorf. His earliest expressive idiom was crude and humorous, its images outrageous, and its content seemingly trivial, but embedded in these works were subversive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, German postwar politics, and classic artistic conventions. Few of Polke's works demonstrate more vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and eclectic creative process than the drawings, watercolors, and gouaches of the 1960s and early 70s. More than 300 works are illustrated, including small sketches in ballpoint and felt-tipped pen, larger sheets in watercolor and gouache, and still others stamped with a dot screen process, as well as pages from over a dozen small sketchbooks and several monumental works on paper. This books was published to accopany the first American exhibiton of these drawings shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1999.

Sigmar Polke: Werke Aus Der Sammlung Froehlich