Sigmar Polke

PHOTOGRAPHS 1968−1998

Publication 2017

Edited by Kicken Berlin and Sies + Höke
Published by Kicken Berlin and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Essay by Paul Schimmel
152 pages with 92 illustrations
ISBN 978-3-932729-98-0

 

"Sigmar Polke’s art has perplexed critics and public alike with its multiplicity of styles, subjects, and positions“, Paul Schimmel writes. "His paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures have variously been described as metaphysical and profound on the one hand, and jocular and deliberately dumb-witted on the other. Trying to hit Polke’s moving target with the cannon of art historical apparatus is no easy task. His densely layered work, with its commitment to finding again and again an equivalency between subject and technique, resists facile interpretation. The interplay of photography, film, painting, and sculpture throughout Polke’s oeuvre illustrates his chameleonic nature as an artist and his ever-changing focus of attention, but it also highlights his insatiable drive to experiment with and between the boundaries of established mediums. Polke’s photographic work, in particular, is characterized by incautiousness, both in the demanding and dangerous places he visited to find his subjects and in the daredevil printing techniques he used in his makeshift studio darkroom—aiming for methods that 'fit with their subject,' as he characterized it.“