Inspired by Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) was a German painter and photographer whose complex, multi-layered paintings play an important role in modern German art. Born in Oels, Lower Silesia (now in Poland), he fled East Germany with his family in 1953 to West Germany, where he first apprenticed as a stained glass artist and then studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Polke experimented with a wide array of styles, subjects and materials. In the 1970s he focused on photography, before returning to painting in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance from chemical reactions between paint and other substances. In the last 20 years of his life, he has produced paintings that focus on historical events and their associated perceptions.

In 1963, alongside Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, Polke is said to have created  the style of "capitalist realism". An artistic style known for its political irony, it vises its attack at the consumerist society. Polke rejected the fact that his early works were described as European pop art; instead he wanted to distance himself from capitalism and any form of art associated with it. He participated in the Neo-expressionist movement, which ultimately got him noticed in the United States. Polke was also a professor at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg from 1977 to 1991 and lived in Cologne from 1979, where he died of cancer in 2010.

Sigmar Polke has received numerous international awards and was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. In 2014, two retrospectives were held at MoMA in New York and Tate Britain in London. His paintings are sold exclusively through auction houses, where in 2015, for example, the painting Jungle (1967) broke the previous Sotheby's sales record at more than 24 million euros. Polke's artistic legacy can be seen in the works of contemporary artists such as Danielle Desplan, Julian Schnabel or Richard Prince. In this collection, Artsper presents a selection of works by promising contemporary artists, who are also inspired by the variety of styles, subjects and materials used in the work of Sigmar Polke.