ART-TRIBUTE:Alibis-Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke was one of the most insatiably experimental artists of the 20th century, who continuity experimented with various art mediums. This retrospective at the Ludwik Museum in Cologne , is the first in Germany to bring together the unusually broad range of media he worked with during his five-decade career.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Ludwig Museum Archive
The roughly 250 items of the exhibition “Alibis-Sigmar Polke Retrospective”, many of them never shown before in Germany, include not only paintings and drawings, with which he achieved his reputation, but also print, sketchbooks, objects, sculptures, photographs, films, slide installations, and photocopy pieces. This inclusive approach reveals how Polke combined different media and blurred the distinctions between them. The title of the exhibition alludes to the new kind of artist that Polke represented: the artist who consistently defies expectations. The show’s title also points to the social and political dimension of Polke’s art, evoking evasive attitudes toward Germany’s Nazi past in the postwar decades. Polke grew up at a time when many Germans deflected blame for the atrocities of the Nazi period with the alibi, “I didn’t see anything”. In various works in the exhibition, Polke opposes many Germans of his generation’s tendency to ignore the Nazi past, as if picking off the scab to reopen the wound. Beneath Polke’s irreverent wit, promiscuous intelligence, and chance operations lay a deep scepticism of all authority. It would be impossible to understand this attitude, and the creativity that grew out of it, without considering Polke’s biography and its setting. In 1945, near the end of World War II, his family fled Silesia (in present-day Poland) for what would soon be Soviet-occupied East Germany, and then escaped again, this time to West Germany, in 1953. In fact, no other artist’s work reflects historical developments in West Germany as closely as his. Polke’s paintings of the 1960s allude ironically to the consumer society that flourished in the wake of the country’s “Economic Miracle”, while his collaborative works of the following decade absorb elements of mass culture and embrace a wide range of media to refer to new social trends and their subcultures.
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Info: Alibis: Sigmar Polke Retrospective, Curating: Barbara Engelbach, Ludwig Museum, Heinrich-Böll-Platz, Köln, Duration: 13/3-5/7/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun: 10:00-18:00, www.museum-ludwig.de
