Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was a German painter and photographer whose experimental, irreverent approach helped redefine postwar European art. Moving fluidly between abstraction and figuration, painting and photography, Polke challenged conventional hierarchies of art and meaning with humor, irony, and constant reinvention.Born in Oels, Silesia (now Olesnica, Poland), Polke studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the early 1960s alongside Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, co-founding what they called “Capitalist Realism” — a satirical response to both American Pop Art and Socialist Realism. Throughout his career, Polke explored the collision of high and low culture, the manipulation of images, and the shifting nature of truth in visual media.Working with an extraordinary range of materials — from printed fabrics, chemical pigments, and resins to photographic emulsions and uranium — Polke transformed the surface of painting into a site of alchemical experimentation. His layered, translucent images often hover between beauty and distortion, illusion and decay.Major series such as Rasterbilder (dot paintings), Alice in Wonderland, and his late resin and interference-color works reveal a restless curiosity about perception and history. His practice bridged painting, photography, and conceptualism, making him one of the most influential European artists of his generation.Polke’s work has been the subject of major retrospectives at Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Museum Ludwig (Cologne). He received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1986) and the Praemium Imperiale (2002).Until his death in Cologne in 2010, Sigmar Polke remained a tireless innovator — an artist for whom experimentation itself was a philosophy, and for whom art was a means to question the world’s images and illusions.