(Oels/Lower Silesia 1942–2010 Cologne)
Untitled, 1986, signed and dated, mixed media on board, 75 x 100 cm, framed

We are grateful to Michael Trier for friendly advice.

Provenance:
European Private Collection - acquired directly from the artist

Polke, who died in 2010 at 69, is usually mentioned in the same breath with two German near-contemporaries, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, as one of the great European male artists of the postwar years. Of the three, though, he was the most resistant to branding, and is still the hardest to get a handle on.

In media, he was all over the map: painting (abstract and figurative), drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film, installation, performance, sound art; he did them all, often messy, counterintuitive combinations. Stylistically, he brushed up against Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism, only to lift their moves and mock them.

He had a thing about making art from weird materials: tawdry fabrics, radioactive pigments, liquid detergent, soot. He put the discipline in interdisciplinary under stress. His work can be daintily detailed and virtuosic, but it can also look polish-aversive and incomplete. Sometimes he seems to start a painting or a drawing, then stop, as if to say: You get the idea.
From: Holland Cotter, Found Everything, Tried Everything, All His Own Way in: The New York Times, Art Review, April 17, 2014

“It is the processes in and of themselves that interest me.
The picture isn’t really necessary.
The unpredictable proves to be the most interesting thing.”
Sigmar Polke