Sigmar Polke – genius by accident
A genius by accident is the most apt description of Sigmar Polke and his innovative artistic creations. The remarkable energy and vitality that Polke's works emanate to this day reflect a nonconformist character that viewed traditions and conventions not as guidelines but as obstacles that were to be overcome with ease. With his painting “Höhere Wesen befahlen: obere rechte Ecke schwarz malen!” (Higher beings commanded: paint the upper right corner black!), an icon of German post-war art, Polke earned himself the highly coveted status of a revolutionary anti-artist. With wit and irony, Polke pokes fun at the traditional art world and the general idea of the artist as a genius inspired by divine forces. Polke's art radically broke with the traditions of art history, but at the same time, it has become an essential part of art history today, 15 years after Polke's death. The Polke retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London in 2014/15 made Polke's outstanding position in postwar European art clear. In addition to New York and London, the critical exhibition was also on view at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where it brought together everything that has made Polke's work so incomparable and fascinating for over half a century.



Dot by dot – Polke's iconic grid paintings and the art of the “New Realists”
First and foremost, there are the magnificent grid paintings of the 1960s, such as the famous painting “Freundinnen” (Girlfriends, 1965, Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart), in which Polke, in keeping with the spirit of Pop Art, uses the grid printing technique of newspapers and magazines for his artistic language. Only 24 years old, Polke meticulously applied dots onto the canvas, dot by dot, with great patience, as in our series “Kallablüten”, of which one sheet was on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1999, creating a completely new visual aesthetic of iridescent color gradients. Like Gerhard Richter's early black-and-white photo paintings, these fascinating works by Polke are a visual expression of the countercultural spirit of the 1960s. Our series “Kallablüten” is also an important example of this early creative phase, today considered the most sought-after in the artist's extremely diverse oeuvre. During these years, Polke and Richter, both students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Karl Otto Götz, worked in close collaboration and shook up the art world of the time with their representational, photo-based art. The young artists broke radically with the established gestural painting of European Informalism, painting figuratively and with almost no visible brushstrokes.



Similar to Andy Warhol's “Flowers,” which the American pop artist created beginning in 1964, a photographic template from mass media may also have been fundamental to Polke's “Kallablüten,” from around the same time. Polke also uses the supposedly trivial flower motif, which also contains references to the popular flower painting of the pre-war period, widespread in the 1960s in reproductions found in many middle-class living rooms in Germany, to establish his completely new figurative and serial approach. In ''Kallablüten'', Polke overcomes the traditional genre of the flower still life and reinvents its aesthetic principles. The artist frequently drew inspiration from print and classified ads for his works. As in the present case, the exact source is often impossible to identify—unlike Richter, who documented all his image sources in his 'Atlas.' Polke constructs the artwork from individual dots, thus making the process of the picture's creation transparent. Just as the newspaper photo plays with the illusion of reality, Polke's grid images play with the illusion of newspaper print, which, upon closer inspection, proves to be unique and, thus, pure deception. Each dot is different in execution and color composition, giving it its distinctive character. To this day, it is fascinating to experience this dot character in front of Polke's originals and to try to fathom the unique rhythm their sequence creates. Shortly before making the “Kallablüten,” Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter staged the legendary exhibition “Neue Realisten” (New Realists) at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, a title that, alongside “German Pop” and the ironic self-designation “Capitalist Realism,” would henceforth be used to classify this young art movement. The non-conformist, youthful spirit characterizes Polke's rare grid paintings of the 1960s and his love of dots, which would become his trademark.



Sigmar Polke – master of the dot and free association
Polke revisited the technical innovation of the grid dot in the 1980s and 1990s for his famous fabric paintings, in which the grid dots were often incorporated as unrecognizable enlarged fragments or quotations. They remained references to his revolutionary early work but also, of course, to the work of Pop Art artists Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, and Andy Warhol, whose work was also fundamentally influenced by the artistic exploration of Benday dots, which are required for the reproduction of templates in offset printing. In an additive process, the fabric pictures merge a highly enlarged system of grid dots, the pattern of the fabric, and representational and gestural elements into an associative whole, thus utilizing a process developed from the free combination of a wide variety of elements. This process is reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings, which the American artist developed from his early “Combines.” Polke, too, repeatedly presents observers of his dense creations with an engaging yet potentially unsolvable puzzle. From the outset, Polke's entertaining and tongue-in-cheek oeuvre has been characterized by his skillful blending of diverse references and allusions to form an associative whole. Polke would have turned 80 in 2021, and the art magazine Monopol celebrated him on this anniversary with the following words: “Sigmar Polke's laughter echoes. It comes from a delightfully silly reverence, from an artist liberated from all constraints – and one whose seminal influence lives on to this day.” [JS]