Artists

Sigmar Polke

Press release

From September 2024, in its historic rooms, the Schinkel Pavillon will show a large-scale exhibition by Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), with over forty works from important international collections. Polke is considered one of the outstanding artists of the 20th century in Germany and beyond. This exhibition aims to make Polke, a pioneer for generations of young artists, and whose works has not been publicly shown in a very long time, accessible to a wide audience once again. The exhibition brings together paintings, photographs, films and prints, dating from the 1960s to the 2000s and illustrates Polke’s artistic complexity, characterized by his astute observations, poignant placements of irony and witty joy in experimentation. The selected works focus on the political aspects of Polke’s work, demonstrating not only his precise analysis of his present, but also his unique skill as a critical commentator ahead of his time.

From an early age, Polke developed a keen interest in found images, their circulation, legibility and impact on the public imagination. In 1963, as response to the socialist GDR art of the time, the student Polke, together with fellow artists Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter, proclaimed the artistic movement Kapitalistischer Realismus [Capitalist Realism], later known as German Pop. The booming economy of West Germany and the accompanying post-war bourgeois idyll created novel, consumerist imagery, which Polke playfully and presciently incorporated into his art. While anchoring his pictorial sources in the reality of mass-media, he simultaneously “alchemically” steered the painting process in new directions, thus forging insights far beyond modernity into both history and the future.