Sigmar Polke

The 1960s brought a widespread move away from painting, but this stimulated Sigmar Polke to create an oeuvre in which painting itself is perpetually reinvented. In fact it was these very doubts about the panel painting and the painting process which lay at the root of his work, its zigzag path, its irony, and its less and less comprehensible techniques.
Polke's trivial subjects and refusal to make a statement are reminiscent of Dada, his application of preformed images to the canvas recalls Pop Art, and the open form and lack of style are recollective of Fluxus. Above all, however, Polke's work is characterized by a highly individual approach throughout (and for the critics, by its resistance to interpretation).

Moderne Kunst, 1968

Polke is provocatively reticent about the differences which have evolved between high and low culture. The art of the 1950s was also subject to his irony. Moderne Kunst has become an icon of Federal German history, because in this painting a hard-won avowal of modernity - the epitome of which was, after all, abstract art - is taken to a ridiculous extreme. Here in particular one finds a new avant-garde emerging, namely in the radical scope of the doubts, the questions, the new beginning.

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