Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern

Tate Modern is now showing the retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010, previously at MoMA, New York. Polke, who died in 2010, was born in Silesia in 1941, fleeing west with his family as the Red Army advanced in 1945. In 1953 they left East Germany and settled in Düsseldorf. By the time he was a student alongside Gerhard Richter and others, the German economic recovery (Wirtschaftswunder) was under way and he responded to the rise of they saw as an American-style consumer culture with pop art works like The Sausage Eater (1963, Der Wurstesser, below left) and “raster drawings” made up of dots like Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald (1963, below right):

The dot drawings were far less mechanistic in appearance than Lichtenstein’s and part of a social commentary (Capitalist Realism) on German affluence and tourism, for example Girlfriends (1965-66, Freundinnen, below left), and fabric paintings like The Palm Painting (1964, Das Palmenbild, below right):

Also in the 1960s he took to criticising modern art in its various forms, whether abstract or conceptual – Solutions V (1967, Lösungen V, below left), even ridiculing artists in general - Polke as Astronaut (1968, Polke als Astronaut, below right):

During the 1970s Polke experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and went on the hippie trail through what is now called AfPak, and then further afield, making films (there are three at the Tate) and colouring in photographic images - Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan), (1974-1978 , below top)- but also painting works like Supermarkets (1976, below lower) which are a continuation of earlier preoccupations:

After the 1980s Polke began experimenting with unusual pigments – dye extracted from snails or heat and humidity sensitive substances as he used at the Venice Biennale in1986. A raster painting Police Pig (1986, Polizeischwein, below left), was hung outside the German pavilion. At that time he also made a series of Watchtower paintings which evoke both divided Germany and the Nazi camps, Watchtower (1984, Hochsitz, below right):

In the 1990s he experimented even more widely with soot paintings, distorted photocopying , resins, the effect of radiation on photographic materials, 3-D lenses and holograms, all explored in the Tate show. At the end of all this in 2007 he created The Illusionist (below), a work which I will not attempt to interpret but instead reproduce what Tate Modern had to say about it:

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 continues in London until 8 February 2015 and will be at Museum Ludwig in Cologne from 14 March to 5 July.

I have now posted here about all three of the most highly regarded German post-War painters, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer being the others.  For what it’s worth, my personal preference is for Richter.

Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern

A recent post here about Degas at the RA touched on the subject of the impact of photography on painting, which is an unavoidable issue when visiting Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern. This is a major retrospective coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, and, as with Tate Modern’s Miró retrospective earlier this year, it is impossible to dissociate the artist’s work from the turbulence of 20th century European history.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and grew up under National Socialism followed by Soviet-enforced communism in East Germany. In 1961 he escaped to the FDR and began painting photographs from a family album (“… painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic and inartistic thing that anyone could do”). Subsequently his works addressed the Nazi past and bombed cities, but also responded to the art he was seeing in the West – in 1965 Ema (Nude on a Staircase) followed an encounter with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No2 from 1912 (below right and left).

Once settled in the West, Richter’s work moved in various directions. The Tate show includes many works which are abstract, for example the Colour Charts and later Squeegee and Roller Paintings. But in the 1980s Richter produced images of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group based on press photography. And other representational work exhibited includes two haunting portraits of his daughter Betty from 1977 and 1988. These exhibit Richter’s ‘out-of-focus’ technique with edges softened by brushing across the wet paint.

As well as explorations like his 1974 work 4096 Colours, Richter is interested in optical effects – two constructions explore the reflections provided by parallel sheets of glass. 4096 Colours has a mathematical basis recognisable to anyone familiar with binary numbers. The square is of 64 x 64 elements; each of the 1024 shades appears four times. Each shade was generated as a unique combination systematically made from red, blue, yellow and grey (one source says green). He revisited its theme on a larger scale in 2007 for a new stained-glass window in Cologne Cathedral (below right, 4096 Colours left – but neither well).

Meryl Streep, in London for advance publicity of her film The Iron Lady (release 6 January) reportedly said that “she would like to go see Gerhard Richter at the Tate but thought she would be mobbed.” Perhaps the Director of Tate Modern will assist if she returns in January, although Streep must be more capable of adopting an anonymous persona than practically anyone else – so perhaps she’s already been unrecognised. Lesser mortals have until 8 January. In the meantime, Richter’s website is excellent.