This autumn, Tate Modern presents Alibis, an exhibition bringing together works by the German experimental artist, Sigmar Polke. The show embraces the work spanning the five decades of Polke’s career – among them paintings, films, sound from recordings, prints, sculptures, notebooks, slide projections and photocopies, and also encompassing material which has never been unveiled before.
Widely regarded as one of the key figures of the postwar generation, Polke, who was born in 1941 and died in 2010, possessed an irreverent wit exploring a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials; During his career the polymath artist focused on painting, and photography producing cunning figurative paintings at one moment and abstract photographs the next capturing the ephemeral arrangements of objects created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. Photographs were made by exposing the paper to uranium, while paintings were created by brushing photosensitive chemicals onto canvas. The exhibition will include several films where Polke played with double-exposure, just as paintings would have layers of transparent imagery.
Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan) 1974-1978 Glenstone Foundation (Potomac, USA)
His “anti-style” of art, unconventional lifestyle and sharp critiques of the growing consumer society of West Germany drove him to the foundation of the painting movement “Capitalist realism” expressing irreverently his ironic humor and cynical attitude towards all forms of authority, confronting political and social commentary and eliding conventional distinctions between high and low culture.
Police Pig (Polizeischwein) 1986
With his exceptional grasp of the properties of his materials, the voracious artist investigated ideas of contamination and transformation, working with antiquated and sometimes poisonous pigments, extracting dye from boiled snails, and employing unorthodox objects as varied as gold leaf, meteorite powder, bubble wrap, potatoes, and soot on glass. The radical cultures of the 1970s played a role in Polke’s art, as he experimented with psychedelic materials such as hallucinogenic substances and made many works featuring mushrooms. In 1973, he moved to a farm to live and work collaboratively with family, friends and other artists. He also travelled extensively, the impact of which is evident throughout his works.
Girlfriends (Freundinnen) 1965/66
Polke experimented freely with the conventions of art and art history, especially towards the end of his career, pushing the boundaries between different media. The exhibition will show how he used photocopiers to make new distorted compositions, while the Lens Paintings made in the 2000s attempt to emulate holograms in their use of semi-transparent layers of materials.
Polke as Astronaut (Polke als Astronaut) 1968. Private Collection
Through a playful and political retrospective the Alibis show provides an overview of Polke’s cross-disciplinary innovations and career and places his enormous skepticism of all social, political, and artistic traditions against German history, exemplifying the definition of alibi, “in or at another place”, which also suggests a deflection of blame.
by Xenia Founta
Images courtesy of the Estate of Sigmar Polke /DACS, London/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
The exhibition will be at Tate Modern from October 9, 2014 until February 8, 2015