A genius against his will—this is probably the most apt description of Sigmar Polke and his revolutionary artistic work. The unique energy and vitality Polke’s creations still exude today can be attributed to his nonconformist personality, which views traditions and conventions not as guidelines but as obsolete hurdles to be overcome with nonchalance. “We cannot rely on the fact that good paintings will be created one day—we must take matters into our own hands!” is a famous quote by Sigmar Polke and his artist friend Gerhard Richter, and Polke and Richter indeed took matters into their own hands. By the time he created his programmatic painting “Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black!” (1969, Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart), Polke officially claimed to be the much-vaunted “revolutionary anti-artist.” With wit and irony, Polke pokes fun at the traditional art world and the notion of a divinely inspired artistic genius. But Polke’s art also radically broke with art-historical tradition through his legendary grid paintings. Well into the wild decades of the 1980s and 1990s—a time when the Rhineland was the vibrant center of the German art scene—Polke continued to develop this style of painting toward a radical form of anti-art, layering it across multiple pictorial planes and weaving it—through his increasingly technically experimental painting—into a cohesive whole, dense in both visual and conceptual terms. With confidence and a great sense of humor, Polke alluded to—and at the same time poked fun at—a long tradition of motifs dating back at least to Rembrandt in the painting “Le Lit” (French for “the bed”), which captivates viewers with its slightly glittering and shimmering surface. Formally, Polke pushed the boundaries of representational art to their absolute limit: Only upon reading the title can one discern, as a light spot amid the painted grid dots, the outline of a white pillow. The black form in the foreground is also provocative and ambiguous: is it part of the bed frame, or rather a stylized reference to male—or even female—genitalia? Rembrandt’s etching “Le Lit à la française” (1646) quickly gained fame for its direct depiction of sexuality, without the veiled eroticism of mythological scenes that was still customary at the time. An early scandal in art history, it deliberately shattered social conventions and transcended traditional ways of seeing. With his work “Le Lit,” Polke joins a significant art-historical tradition that was carried into the modern era by artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch in his famous painting “The Day After” (1894/95). Furthermore, ever since van Gogh’s painting “Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles” (1888/89, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), the bed has always simultaneously served as a visual reference to its creator—another tradition closely linked to the motif of the bed, which, alongside Polke, was continued into the 1990s by artists such as Tracey Emin in her installation “My Bed” (1998).
Most recently, the Polke retrospective presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London in 2014–15 demonstrated the international significance of Polke's innovative oeuvre.