Background
Sigmar Polke was born on February 13, 1941 in Oels, Germany (present-day Olesnica, Poland). In 1953, his family escaped in East Germany.
Sigmar Polke was born on February 13, 1941 in Oels, Germany (present-day Olesnica, Poland). In 1953, his family escaped in East Germany.
In 1959, Polke became an apprentice at a stained glass factory. Since 1961 to 1967, Sigmar studied at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy under Karl Otto Götz and Gerhard Hoehme. Also, he was deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys.
In 1963, together with other painters, such as Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter, Polke organized an exhibition of their own work in an empty butcher's shop in Dusseldorf. The show helped to launch the artists' early careers and introduce the term "Capitalist Realism". By the end of the decade, Polke would have solo exhibitions at such notable galleries, as Galerie René Block (Berlin), Galerie Schmela (Dusseldorf), Galerie Heiner Friedrich (Munich) and Galerie Rudolf Zwirner (Cologne).
In 1971, he took to the road, traveling extensively around the world for most of the 1970s, usually alone. His wanderings took him to Paris, Pakistan, Afghanistan, South America and the United States. He took a camera and created a series of images, documenting his travels, experimenting with photographic development and printing techniques. During this period, the painter also experimented with mind-altering drugs, including LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms, as a part of the process of producing art. When not on the road, Polke resided in an artists' commune, called "Gaspelshof" near Dusseldorf.
In 1977, Sigmar was appointed as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, a post he held until 1991.
In the 1980s, Polke's art took on a more serious tone, avoiding the colorful Pop art and drug influenced-work, which had comprised his earlier work. Also, at the beginning of the decade, he traveled to Australia and Southeast Asia, where he discovered a variety of non-traditional materials, that he used in his artworks. Since that time, Sigmar started to incorporate meteor dust and arsenic, which reacted chemically on the canvas.
The 1980s saw a significant international revival of painting as a medium and Polke was at the forefront of this, along with his former collaborator, Gerhard Richter. In 2002, Polke developed a new technique of "machine painting". Those were his first completely mechanically-produced paintings, which he made by tinting and altering images on a computer and then photographically transferring them onto large sheets of fabric. Up until this point, Polke had rejected mechanical processes, preferring to explore the visual effects of mechanical technology by hand.
Sigmar continued to produce art until his death in 2010, often in collaboration with his second wife Augustina von Nagel, and always experimenting with new materials and media including photocopies and holograms.
During his lifetime, Polke participated in numerous international biennales, including documenta, the Bienal de São Paulo and the Venice Biennale.
Sigmar Polke was one of those painters, who introduced the term "Capitalist Realism". During his lifetime, he also attained numerous awards, including Young Germans Award in 1964, Golden Lion Award in 1986, Erasmus Prize in 1994, Praemium Imperiale in 2002 and others.
Today, his works are kept in the collections of different museums and galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Kunstmuseum Bonn and others.
In the 1980s, Sigmar and other German artists, including Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, A.R. Penck and Gerhard Richter, were part of a movement, known as Neo-Expressionism, which garnered great attention in the United States.
Sigmar Polke was married twice. During the 1980s, he married his second wife Augustina von Nagel, a sculptor.
Polke had two children — Georg Polke and Anna Polke.
