Sigmar Polke's alchemy

Associated media

Stephen Bury reviews the new Sigmar Polke show in New York, before it heads off for Londona and Cologne

One of my – many – regrets is not seeing Sigmar Polke’s installation at the 1986 Venice Biennale, the theme of which was art and knowledge and included an exhibition on art and alchemy. Polke entitled his exhibition ‘Athanor’ after the slow furnace used in alchemy. The large curved wall opposite the entrance of the German pavilion was painted with cobalt chloride pigment, which reacted to humidity, changing from red, when it was humid, to blue when it was dry. A chunk of cinnabar and gold flakes were embedded in it. It was flanked by reflective honey-coloured ‘Synthetic-Resin Paintings’ (Kunstoffsiegel-Bilder) and there was a meteorite in front of it. Elsewhere there were light-sensitive, abstract and raster paintings.

It was almost as if Polke were celebrating ‘degenerate art’ in a pavilion where the curved wall had been installed by the Nazis in 1938 and where Arno Breker, a German sculptor favoured by the Nazis, had celebrated the National Socialist values of Audacity (Kühnheit) and Readiness (Bereitschaft).

For those who, like me, missed the Venice Biennale installation, the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York provides an opportunity to see the richness and diversity of perhaps the greatest painter of the late 20th century. Unusually for MoMA, the exhibition takes place entirely on the second floor. Instead of labels there is an exhibition guide with numbered diagrams of the walls. With 265 objects, it is one of the largest shows ever seen at MoMA. It was organized by Kathy Halbreich and Lanka Tattersall at MoMA and Mark Godfrey of Tate Modern. Though chronological in structure it begins with a cross-career sampling in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.

Polke was born in 1945 in Oels, in the Silesian area of Eastern Germany, now Poland. At the end of the Second World War Polke’s family fled to Thuringia and then in 1953 escaped from East Germany to Düsseldorf, where, after an apprenticeship at a stained-glass factory (the last works in this show are the posthumously installed windows for the Grossmünster church in Zurich, 2006–9) he enrolled at the Kunstakademie. There, his fellow students were Gerhard Richter (b.1932),  the abstract painter Blinky Palermo (1943–77) and Konrad Lueg (b. Konrad Fischer, 1939–96).

In 1963 Polke, along with Gerhard Richter, Wolf Vostell and Konrad Lueg, founded Capitalist Realism, a sort of manila version of Pop art. In Gallery One, which has an overview of Polke’s work 1963–2004 is Raster Drawing (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald) (1963). Instead of Warhol’s mechanical process or the regular Benday dots of Lichtenstein,  Polke dipped the tip of a pencil rubber/eraser into poster paint and stamped it on the paper – a very handmade replica of the halftone image. Also from 1963 is The Sausage Eater, dispersion paint on canvas. This is in far contrast to Lichtenstein’s Hot Dog (1963): thin brown links of Polke’s sausages are being ingested by a small brown head in profile – it is as if the sausages are entrails.... Cassone subscribers click here to read on

Not a subscriber? Click here to subscribe or get a week's free trial subscription

Reader comment: This tells me so much about Polke and pours reasons upon reason to visit the exhibition. Fantastic! I rate Polke as a modern-day da Vinci - both geniuses, leading not following.