Sigmar Polke, 1941–2010

last updated 8 January 2015

In the hands of Sigmar Polke, anything could be transformed into art. He created memorable works out of potatoes, botched photographs, and even pajamas sewn together. Whatever medium he turned his hand to, his intention was to mock and subvert contemporary life. His work strongly influenced younger American painters such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

Polke (pronounced POLK-uh) was born in Silesia, in what was then eastern Germany and is now part of Poland. He fled to West Germany in 1953 and settled in Düsseldorf, a center of experimental art, said the London Daily Telegraph. A yearlong apprenticeship as a glass painter “contributed to his lifelong attraction to transparency and layering.” His early work echoed that of such American pop artists as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, but where their work was sleek and glossy, Polke’s “tawdry materials, deliberately off-key printing, and random splashes of paint” implied a slowly decaying world.

Polke’s work grew steadily more anarchic in the 1970s, as he experimented with LSD and other drugs and traveled the world photographing “opium dens in Pakistan, gay bars in Brazil, and bear-baiting in Afghanistan,” said The Washington Post. In the 1980s, his art took a darker turn, with a series of large paintings of watchtowers that evoked Nazi prison camps. And he continued to work with such ephemeral materials as beeswax and candle smoke. “I don’t care if the pieces fall apart in 20 years,” he said. “And as for art history, I tear the pages out of the history books and throw them away!”