Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to announce Sigmar Polke: Photographs, an exhibition dedicated to the photographic works of Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view Polke’s photographic works, an often overlooked but important facet of his wide-ranging oeuvre.
Painting remains central to Polke’s legacy, but photography emerged as a critical medium for the artist in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like many of his contemporaries, Polke traveled extensively and turned to photography to make art, explore, and reimagine the world. He rejected the traditional role of photography as documentation and experimented with different techniques, including negative manipulation, multiple exposures, deliberate blurring, hand-coloring, layering, and collage. Unlike conventional photographic practices, Polke rarely worked in editions. Instead, each print, altered through spontaneous intervention in the darkroom, was treated as a unique object. His process allowed for accident, chance, and unpredictability.
Sigmar Polke: Photographs features early works from the late 1960s, including the edition …Höhere Wesen befehlen (…Higher Beings Command) (1967–68). Many works on view date from the 1970s and depict fellow artists such as Georg Baselitz, Günter Brus, James Lee Byars, Gilbert & George, and Arnulf Rainer, alongside images from his travels to Paris, Pakistan, and Antwerp, where he visited A.R. Penck’s exhibition at Wide White Space in 1972.
Born in 1941 in the former East Germany, Sigmar Polke grew up near Düsseldorf and enrolled in the art academy there at the age of 20. Since the late 1960s, Polke has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions worldwide and a featured artist multiple times in documenta and the Venice Biennale, including being awarded the Golden Lion at the XLII Venice Biennale in 1986. In 1995, a retrospective of Polke’s photography titled Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish opened at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and then traveled to Site Santa Fe and Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1998, the International Center of Photography, New York awarded Polke the Infinity Award for Art. In 2014, a major retrospective titled Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and traveled to Tate Modern, London and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Polke died in Cologne in 2010.
