Untitled Photo Series
1970
Gelatin silver print

Composition
1983
Acrylic on paper

Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was born in Oels, Silesia, (now Oleśnica, Poland)—the seventh of eight siblings—and died in Cologne, Germany. Forced to leave in 1945, during the expulsion of Germans from Silesia, the family relocated to East Germany. When Polke was 12, they escaped to the West on a train, where he feigned sleep to deflect attention from the authorities.

His father was an architect and the family had been affluent, but they left everything behind when immigrating, trading comfort for freedom. The dislocation was jarring for young Sigmar, who began spending his free time in Dusseldorf’s galleries and museums, and soon decided to become an artist. He landed a job at a stained-glass factory, where he worked until he was admitted to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1961. It was an exciting time to study at the Academy. Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth and Günther Uecker were professors, and fellow students included Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg with whom Polke formed the Capitalist Realism painting movement. A tongue-in-cheek provocation, the young artists’ concept alluded to both American Pop art and German Socialist Realism. Polke made paintings of men’s socks and sausages, among other proletarian goods, as well as of newspaper and magazine photographs.

Uninterested in a traditional career path, however, he stopped painting for much of the 1970s. He lived in a commune for a while, and travelled the world, experimenting with psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and LSD. He constantly took photographs, and in his typically irreverent way, often interfered with the resulting prints; folding, applying radioactive chemicals and drawing or painting on them.

Polke returned to painting in the 1980s, continuing his exploratory approach. The artist made little distinction between media, not only painting on photographs and paper, but experimenting with an alchemist’s array of materials from arsenic to jade to snail mucus. Polke continued to sample images too.