At the age of six, Sigmar Polke painted a bomber with little swastikas tumbling out of its belly. Born in Lower Silesia in 1941, the artist was a war child. This fate connected him with his friend Gerhard Richter. Both had fled from the GDR to the West, both soon became the most important and influential German artists of the post-war period. In 2010, Sigmar Polke died at the age of 69 as a result of cancer. Some claim this had something to do with his work. The “alchemist of art” experimented with all sorts of forbidden color pigments, including arsenic and verdigris, in his often mysteriously shimmering paintings. The prices on the art market show that Polke’s star is still as bright as day eleven years after his death. On November 15, 2021, his painting “Raster Painting with Palm Trees” was sold at Sotheby’s auction house for $21.5 million.
Two days earlier, on November 13, 2021, gallery owner Josef Lochner opened his small gallery, a former whirlpool shop in the old town of Dachau, his new exhibition with prints and collages by the legendary Sigmar Polke. The world public did not take much notice of this. What surprises exhibition organizer Josef Lochner is that hardly more than 200 visitors have strayed into this formidable exhibition in the past five months, even though Dachau is known to have a very art-loving audience. In the Christo exhibition before that, more than 900 people came. What’s going on there?
“Toys and Money Printing Machine”
Christo is of course very popular in this country and has been well known since his artistic packaging of the Reichstag, even among those who, looking at abstract paintings, like to claim that their child could do it just as well. Or her dog. Polke isn’t all that abstract, though. Above all, he’s a fairly entertaining artist, snotty and refreshingly irreverent. You only have to look at his “Banale”: a stick figure with the body of half a banana, which appears in a rich cucumber green. In her broad form she is reminiscent of an overweight priest in a cassock, with the circle hastily scrawled around her head it is not possible to tell exactly whether it is the brim of a hat, a wobbly halo or a hint of tipsyness.
Greetings from Germany to Andy Warhol’s pop art banana: “Die Banale” on a flipchart background in cucumber green.
(Photo: Galerie Lochner/ VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2022)
Polke, which is also what makes his works so appealing, leads the viewer onto a ground that never stops swaying, here you can’t really believe your eyes or your intellect. Uncertainty is part of his artistic program. What you see in his pictures is perhaps all just a nice appearance, imagination, roughly gridded hallucination as in “Hallucie”, where a painted rabbit face grins at you from the large pixels in the background.
“The Sigmar graphics were actually a toy and a money printing machine,” said his son Georg in 2017 interview, which can be accessed on Youtube. His father created these prints “so that everyday life runs smoothly” – and he “did it very diversely”. Polke junior seems a bit smart in the conversation, but what he says still sounds understandable. The themes and motifs that can be seen in this exhibition range from the accurate reproduction of a printing error in large and in detail in a black-and-white sheet music image to a delicate multicolored triptych of an iceberg, which today almost has to be attributed to otherworldly phenomena Dachau can see. The graphics cover a period from 1972 to 2003 and thus reflect a broad cross-section of Polke’s work. They always move in a field of tension between composition and scribbling, between deeper meaning and the pleasure in pure nonsense.
Polke’s series “Cologne Beggar” reflects that the new affluent society of the young Federal Republic has become more prosperous, but not necessarily more social and fair.
(Photo: Galerie Lochner/ VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2022)
Most of the works on display come from the edition by Klaus Staeck, a friend and colleague of the unconventional artist. Staeck has published part of his extensive correspondence conducted by fax. In it he documents how he kept asking Polke to meet. First friendly. Then impatient. Then increasingly desperate. Finally almost begging. “The most difficult thing was probably getting him to sign his work,” says Josef Lochner. The gallery owner can count himself lucky: all the works in his gallery are signed.
Even if one finds many stylistic features of Pop Art in Sigmar Polke, his ambitions went far beyond that and, above all, went deeper into social reality. While the American Pop Art artists primarily found a treasure trove for new colorful motifs in the brave new consumer world, Polke questioned the promise of happiness in the aspiring economic miracle of the Federal Republic under the catchphrase of “capitalist realism”.
Polke makes fun of everything – including art itself
The game material provided Polke mostly the pamphlets of the brave new glossy world: newspaper ads, department store catalogues, advertising photos and playboy-Pages, which he reproduced greatly enlarged so that the rastering came to the fore. Sometimes he put the motifs on the copier and turned them during the copying process in order to create distortions, alienations, creative image disturbances. Polke transformed banal models into art and at the same time caricatured the empty promises of happiness in politics. He made fun of society, which settled comfortably in a petty-bourgeois idyll between spring flowers and kidney-shaped tables, instead of dealing with their entanglements in Nazi barbarism and war.
There are only 15 prints each in four different color variants of the triptych “Iceberg”, which is extremely complex in terms of printing technology. The starting point is a woodcut from the Romantic period.
(Photo: Toni Heigl/ VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2022)
Polke not only made fun of the consumer world, he also made fun of the art world itself. One of his best-known works is entitled “Higher beings commanded: paint the upper right corner black.” Presumably, the Russian avant-garde artist Kasimir Malevich had previously been in contact with this higher being, also painted the lower left corner and thus created one of the most famous iconic works in 20th century art: “The Black Square”. It may also be that the picture has nothing at all to do with Malevich. With Polke, you never really know. The artist, like his graphics, eludes unequivocal definition when one gets too close to them. Then everything dissolves into a tangle of dots.
On the biographical information board that Josef Lochner hangs up at each of his exhibitions, there is a nice quote: “We can’t rely on good pictures being painted one day, we have to take matters into our own hands!” That’s what Polke did, including with a groundbreaking self-portrait as a coconut palm. The exhibition can be visited in the Lochner Gallery until March 13th. Higher beings command: look!
Sigmar Polke. Exhibition in the Lochner Gallery, Konrad-Adenauer-Straße 7. Opening hours: Thursday, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, 12 p.m. to 3 p.m., Sunday and public holidays, 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment on 08131/66 78 18 or 0162 /455 96 99.