503 - Sigmar Polke* (Oels 1941 - 2010 Cologne)

Sigmar Polke* (Oels 1941 - 2010 Cologne) Artwork of the Week, 2002 color serigraph and color lithograph/paper 60 x 80 cm signed Sigmar Polke, dated 2002 numbered 39/70 SCHÄTZPREIS / ESTIMATE € 300 - 500 STARTPREIS / STARTING PRICE € 300 Polke was born on February 13, 1941, in Oels—now Oleśnica, Poland. After the war, his family initially fled to Thuringia before relocating to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953. Starting in 1959, he completed an apprenticeship as a glass painter in Düsseldorf, subsequently studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy (Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf) from 1961 to 1967 under mentors such as Karl Otto Götz and Gerhard Hoehme. During those years, the Düsseldorf Art Academy was a pivotal hub of West German postwar modernism, offering an open environment where Art Informel, object art, performance art, and new visual media converged. Joseph Beuys was a formative teaching presence and a key reference point for an expanded concept of art there, even though Polke was not among his direct students. While still a student in 1963, Polke—together with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (later known as the gallerist Konrad Fischer)—founded the movement known as Capitalist Realism. This deliberately ironic label was a response to the Socialist Realism of the Eastern Bloc, as well as to West German consumer society and American Pop Art. Figures such as Manfred Kuttner, K. P. Brehmer, and Wolf Vostell were also associated with Capitalist Realism; each incorporated advertising, mass media, political imagery, and everyday culture into their work in distinct ways. In his works from the 1960s, Polke drew upon advertising imagery, press photographs, and banal consumer goods, translating them into a detached, often humorously absurd visual language. His work thus engages in a critical dialogue with the American Pop Art of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Richard Hamilton. While Warhol emphasized the serial nature of the world of commodities and media, and Lichtenstein adopted the aesthetics of comic books and printing screens, Polke rendered the halftone dots of newspaper and offset printing deliberately visible—making them appear unstable and painterly. In doing so, he questioned not only the reliability of photographic images but also the mechanisms of their dissemination through mass media. Polke also worked with photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and collage, as well as with unusual fabrics and chemically reactive materials, creating multi-layered image surfaces that were often transparent or iridescent. It was precisely this openness to chance, material processes, and stylistic ruptures that made him a key figure in the renewal of painting after 1960. His international stature grew steadily from the 1970s onwards. Polke lived and worked primarily in Cologne, where he died on June 10, 2010. Retrospectives honoring his work have been held at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. PLEASE NOTE: The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights and platform fee. In the case of normal taxation (marked ° at the estimate), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax is added to the sum of the highest bid, the buyer's premium and platform fee. This amounts to 13% for paintings, drawings, graphic works and sculptures and 20% for photographs and all other items. The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.