Sigmar Polke

Infectiously playful and incredibly versatile: anyone who sees the editions produced by the German artist Sigmar Polke (Oels [Oleśnica], 1941 – Cologne, 2010) can immediately understand why he was considered the sorcerer’s apprentice of visual art. In more than two hundred objects, photographs, photocopies, prints, collages and artist’s books, the editions provide a view of Polke’s work over a period of forty years. They make up an integral part of his oeuvre and relate directly to the techniques that he continued to use in his painting. In that sense they offer, in a nutshell, fantastic insight on his freely unconventional work and thinking. Dr. Axel Ciesielski (1944–2019), collector and founder of Kunstraum am Limes, managed to acquire all of his editions over the years. The complete editions give us a glimpse behind the scenes, into the workings of a studio that looked more like a laboratory which remained closed to outsiders.

Polke’s most important distinguishing feature, according to a critic of The New York Times, is his very lack of one. His work eludes any categorization. During the 1960s he started out with a German variation on American pop art. From there he developed into an artist who had an eye for the provocative and humorous, be it focused on society and Germany’s dark history or the art world. But Polke’s prime concern was the image. This could consist of anything. He worked both figuratively and abstractly, combined the trivial and commonplace with an incomparable knowledge of art history and literature, and stood out by way of his unbridled and joyful urge to experiment. In doing so he worked with any conceivable material. From meteor dust to snail juice, from expensive pigments to toxic arsenic: he used it and avidly employed the unpredictable chemical reactions brought about by the various materials. Yet Polke was also interested in the reproduction of the image. Through the use of graphic techniques – endless copying, adapting– he literally and figuratively lifts depictions out of their contexts. This gave rise to new images that he would then use in his paintings. The way in which painting and graphics influence each other can be seen in Polke’s monumental four-part work Hermes Trismegistos I-IV, one of the highlights of De Pont’s collection. Here the image of the classical alchemist and philosopher Hermes Trismegistos, composed of enlarged halftone dots, emerges among trails and wafts of dripping paint tracks. A mysterious and stirring series that serves as a metaphor for the notion that nothing remains fixed and everything is subject to change.

In light of that work, it is now remarkable to see Polke’s editions which show all of the experiments in form and material throughout his oeuvre. Long before the digital age and before the deluge of images generated by the Internet, he removed figures from their original contexts in order to bend them in all directions like a visual blacksmith. He moved an image back and forth over the glass plate of a copy machine, for instance, and then began to cut it, make it bigger or smaller, duplicate it or tear it apart.

Initially the editions were a way for Polke to produce saleable work on a larger scale. But as his reputation grew he increasingly exploited the unprecedented potential of reproduction. Usually not via techniques commonly known in art circles, such as lithography or serigraphy, but with inexpensive offset printing. He kept on pushing the limits of this, recognizing the extraordinary potential of misprints and sometimes driving his printers to despair with his unusual expectations of material. One series was printed on highly absorbent flock paper; and he worked with fake snake leather, allowing the texture to compete with his halftone dots. Although transparent foils – Polke was once trained as a glass painter – were hardly suited to holding paint, that didn’t keep him from giving it a try nonetheless. It was a success. In these labor-intensive collaborations he frequently wanted the impossible. But for Polke there was no such thing as ‘no’. He even managed to get paint manufacturers to produce temperature-sensitive paint – ultimately without success – in the hope of having his work constantly change color.

Even the idea that an edition consists of identical examples was, for Polke, no rule. Alternating layers of color or hand-painted additions led to various versions of one and the same print, along with countless unique examples. Futhermore, graphic art allowed him to work freely, as in a drawing. The discoveries that he made repeatedly ended up in his paintings, while his painting, in turn, influenced his graphic work. But apart from that the editions reveal his unbelievable delight, inventiveness (Photoshop didn’t exist yet) and freedom in creating images. At the same time Polke was among the first to poke fun at his own work and inspiration. In 2000 he had a rubber stamp made: an unsightly blotch and the words Das kann doch kein Motiv sein (That can’t be a motif, can it?). Yes, with Polke it can. And with this stamp the master thus gave his approval to it.

Image: Sigmar Polke, Filmverführung  1998. Courtesy Kunstraum am Limes – Sammlung Zeitgenössischer Kunst, Hillscheid and Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne. Photo: Werner Baumann. © The estate of Sigmar Polke, Köln, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2021