ARLES.- The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles is hosting a major exhibition devoted to one of the great artists of our time, Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), featuring paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures and films. This exhibition highlights the complexity of the artist’s work, which is tinged with a wicked, unconventional sense of humour, driven by the pleasure of experimentation, and always underpinned by a keen observation of the world and a strong belief system.
Explore the fascinating and complex art of Sigmar Polke. Shop books by and about Sigmar Polke on Amazon.
The featured pieces date from 1963 to 2009 and focus on the medium of painting with which the artist expresses truths about our world, while exploring the idea of a new kind of beauty beyond the conventional. Polke was always a keen analyst and commentator of his time. In France, recognition of his work became significant from the early 1980s onwards. Before Suzanne Pagé presented a major retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1988, the Bama / Chantal Crousel gallery had already exhibited Polke’s work, and in 1984 the French magazine Art Press published a long interview Bice Curiger had conducted with the artist, during which there were many allusions to Franco-German history.
From an early age, Sigmar Polke was interested in printed media images, their impact on the public, their circulation and their readability. At the start of his artistic career in 1963, at the age of 22, together with Gerhard Richter, he introduced Capitalist Realism, also known as German Pop Art, as a response to the dictates of the German Democratic Republic. The growing economy of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany and its bourgeois ethos gave rise to new visual worlds marked by consumerism, advertising and magazines, which Polke incorporated into his work in a playful and insightful manner.
The encounter between Van Gogh and Polke at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles reveals unexpected yet obvious connections, not least through the motif of the potato. For Vincent, this humble tuber is the symbol of a link to the nurturing soil, of the toil of peasants and the poor man’s supper, while for Polke, the potato symbolises the “anti- glamour” of post-war daily life in Germany, as opposed to colourful American Pop Art that glamorises the new world of consumerism. However different Van Gogh and Polke may appear, what they had in common was a positive attitude, characterised by a profound humanism and a desire to escape the conventions of mainstream art.
The title of the exhibition, echoes the slogan “beneath the cobblestones, the beach”, chanted by students in Paris in May 1968 as they tore up cobbled streets to build barricades in a protest movement for freedom which influenced Polke’s early works. The title also evokes a strong foundation in reality seen in both the German artist’s work and in that of Van Gogh. The two paintings by the Dutch painter in the exhibition bear witness to this: Peasant and Peasant Woman Planting Potatoes (April 1885) and Basket of Potatoes (September 1885).
This exhibition shows the seemingly erratic yet far-reaching and coherent progression of Polke’s work, which attracts and inspires today’s young artists. On the one hand, it showcases Polke’s famous 1960s works using the screen dots of newspaper images, and on the other, watercolours and paintings such as Reiherbild II (Picture of herons II, 1968), in which the technical mastery of the line—a kind of formal obsession—is ridiculed.
Sigmar Polke thus deconstructed the classical painting process very early on. His surface was generally not a canvas, but a printed industrial fabric or a net curtain. If he liked to take his time painting a press photo onto the background manually, dot by dot, he also liked to pour liquid paint liberally in big splashes while laughing expansively—creating forms that permanently captured the unexpected, the random, the instant.
Since the early 1960s, Polke also practiced photography. The exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles reveals the extent to which this medium influenced his pictorial practice—and vice versa. A series of photographs from the 1960s–1970s, which have never been exhibited before, can be seen alongside important collections of unique photographic prints such as Paris 1971 (1971) and Palermo, The catacombs (1976). Important pieces from the series of paintings devoted to the theme of the French Revolution will also enhance the visitor experience.
Mental agility and physical experimentation are characteristic of this artist. His work as a whole bears witness to an incomparable love of freedom—both personal and artistic— that never undermines a powerful belief in the communicative power of art. The aim of this exhibition is to make the work of this pioneer (which has not been shown in France for a long time), accessible to the general public and to younger generations.
Exhibition curator: Bice Curiger, assisted by Margaux Bonopera
Sigmar Polke was born in 1941 in Oels, a town in German Silesia (now Olesnica in Poland), and lived in East Germany. In 1953 his family escaped the GDR regime, travelling to West Germany. After living in Berlin, he moved to Düsseldorf, where he began an apprenticeship in a stained-glass factory in 1959, training as a glass painter. He entered the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1961, where his work centred around creative processes blending painting with the dots of newsprint images, producing each dot by hand. He experimented with darkroom and photochemical manipulation in an effort to extend the boundaries of painting.
During this same period, he founded Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalist Realism) with Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner and Konrad Lueg, a group which, as a kind of counterpoint to Socialist Realism and in response to Pop Art and the consumerist tendencies of the art market, proposed a critical and caricatured critique of communist and capitalist values.
Polke devoted the 1970s to travelling and produced many images, documenting his visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg, from 1977 to 1991, but continued to travel. After a one-year stint in Papau New Guinea, Southeast Asia and Australia, he began in the 1980s to use artificial pigments in his paintings, mixing them with industrial products such as motor oil or petrol and making them interact directly on the surface.
He also introduced finely ground semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli and malachite to his works. Resonances with and references to medieval, Renaissance or Baroque art through chemistry or alchemy preoccupied him for the rest of his career. These elements are typical of his approach: one of both hard science and magic that aims to magnify the materials through their interactions, resulting in abstract yet ever-changing landscapes. This unique working method also explores the potential and the symbolic content found in the historical dimension of the materials.
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