Sigmar Polke: Recent Paintings and DrawingsTate Modern, Level 42 October 2003 - 4 January 2004Press view: Wednesday 1 October Admission: £8 (£6 concessions)
Sigmar Polke: Recent Paintings and Drawings is a major exhibition of the renowned German artist's work of the last six years. It will be an important opportunity to see a body of recent accomplishments and many of the large scale works will be on public view for the first time.
The exhibition will trace Polke's newly developed interest in the "printing mistake", the subject of a series of paintings in which the artist has explored technologically marred images taken from various printed media. Drawing upon pre-existing imagery such as satellite spy and newspaper photographs, including surveillance data from Afghanistan, and a shot of the finalists in the annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest held in Key West, Florida, Polke manipulates these visuals through photographic processes and exploits them as subjects for his compositions. This extraordinary body of new work promises to be as evocative and masterful as any that Polke has produced in his long and rich career. It is hoped that it will also provoke a critical reconsideration of Polke's practice of manipulating and balancing abstract and representational strategies to a point of new and powerful resonance.
Polke often distorts and exaggerates mass-produced imagery to create works that parody politics, social conventions, and established artistic and cultural values. During the past forty years he has developed an extraordinarily diverse body of work that is reflective of his keen artistic skills and technical expertise, and a playful and engaging cynicism that is unique.
Sigmar Polke was born in East Germany in 1941 and studied art at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf under Joseph Beuys between 1961 and 1967. Now considered one of the most important figures in post-war German art, Polke first gained notoriety in 1963 alongside fellow students Gerhard Richter and Konrad Leug (who was later to re-emerge as the dealer Konrad Fischer) with their exhibition Capitalist Realism, a response to the Pop art movement, in which they inserted themselves among the furniture on display in the window of a German department store.
The exhibition travels from the Dallas Museum of Art (15 November 2002 - 6 April 2003) where it has been organised by John R. Lane, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Museum, and Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art. Both the Dallas Museum of Art and Tate Modern exhibitions are organised in close collaboration with the artist.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, which is being conceived with the full participation of the artist. Containing a rich selection of found and manipulated images chosen by Polke to reveal his thinking and sources of the last few years, the catalogue will also include essays by Charles Wylie and Dave Hickey, as well as an interview with Polke. The book will be the first major publication in English to address the artist's new and ongoing concerns through consideration of Polke's most recent bodies of work.
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