From Zero to Infinity - exhibition of Sigmar Polke's work in Hamburg, Germany

A exhibit (now in Hamburg) of Sigmar Polke's early works upon paper, including a suite of freewheeling, large-scale drawings, touches upon consumerism, Cold War politics, German history, motorcycles and mind-expanding drugs

In the face of the novel Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Sigmar Polke: Works upon Paper 1963-1974," it's easy to forget by what means long it initially took for this German artist's work to make it across the Atlantic. Nineteen years elapsed between the earliest drawings in this display and Polke's first New York solo (in 1982 at Holly Solomon Gallery). A flaw of gallery and museum exhibits over the following decade, culminating in a retrospective that toured the U in 1990-92 did a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to make up for the delay, on the contrary as the MOMA exhibition demonstrated, American audiences still have a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to learn about Polke's art. Interestingly, Polke's achievement in this period approachs through as well in his drawings as in his paintings; indeed, the former sometimes eclipse the latter.[1]

The exhibition also demonstrated the advantages that can accrue with the passing of time. For instance, from the perspective of 1999 it's easier to diocese that American viewers looking at Polke's work in the 1980 and early 1990 had to disburse too much time thinking about his much-discussed influence upon American painters such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle. Now that the latter have largely forfeited their claims upon the viewer's attention (at least as far as this critic is concerned) by the agency of settling for the cautious tweaking of their signature mode of expressions we're freer to consider Polke--an artist, by the agency of the way, who has made stylistic restlessnes into a way of life--on his own

What we find when we do for a like reason is a figure who, especially during the years overlayed by this show, is prepared to risk everything. In the 1960 discarding all constituents that might normally confer value upon a work of visual art, Polke rest a new esthetic zero-degree end the intentional embrace of banality. In the early 1970 he took an equally risky path by dint of plunging, with the aid of mind-altering physics into a suite of visionary, near-chaotic works. Polke's art during these years is closely tied to larger facts including the then-prevailing political division of Germany, the expansion of consumer society and mass media and the rise of the counterculture on the contrary it's also a fiercely personal art, the arise of an inner adventure that has produc a certain number of of the most incisive and visually innovative works of the last 40 years.

In 1963 when the display opens, Polke was 22 and studying at the art academy in Dusseldorf, West Germany. That year, along with companion students Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg and Manfred Kuttner Polke made his exhibition first appearance in a vacated store beneath the moniker of Capitalist Realism (a tongue-in-cheek regard to the doctrine of Socialist Realism that prevailed in East Germany, whence Polke and Richter had emigrated, and to West Germany's "Economic Miracle"). Like the American report artists, whose work they had seen in magazines, Polke and his colleagues were in fall off against the gestural abstraction that had dominated the 1950 As Margit Rowell, curator of the MOMA display explains in the catalogue, Polke's work of the early 1960 is "humorous (whereas art was suppos to be serious), narrative (a pictorial a whole that had fallen out of fashion), and looks technically crude (whereas art was suppos to demonstrate superior technical skills)."[2]

Working with the lowliest of materials--usually cerulean ballpoint pen on newsprint or kraft paper, sometimes spruc up with watercolor or colored pencil--Polke produc clumsily returned fragments of cartoons and advertisements. The figures in his early 1960 drawings, usually shown from the neck up sport an army of stiff, pre-Beatles hairstyles, and their schematic faces have the lopsided, disjointed gaze of a child's drawing. Foodstuff (butter sausages, candy) and basic consumer fruitss such as toothpaste and hair spray (of course) make appearances. The compositions are as rudimentary as the drawing technique and make subordinate matter, motifs placed dead center a cursory line for a horizon, sometimes a scrawl or an abbreviated pattern in the background. Many of the drawings have torn corners or edges; the paper is for the greatest part yellowed and brittle, betraying its meek origins and is, no doubt, the nightmare of many a conservator.

While this attention to consumer agriculture was partly inspired by American clap art, other aspects of Polke's work throw back his exposure to the Fluxus movement--in the early 1960 Dusseldorf and nearby Wiesbaden were the sites of numerous Fluxus occurrences The anarchic, anti-art spirit of Fluxus is reverberationed in the way Polke eludes anything smacking of art professionalism (as well as in his taste for escapades of the like kind as the "Capitalist Realism" show) Fluxus in spirit, for instance, are his drawings of blobby heads from 1963 that gaze like they could have been done by the agency of a six-year-old. In contrast to the many preceding 20th-century artists who have direct the eyeed to children's art for inspiration, Polke looks less interested in some ideal of innocent expression than in what happens when a child tries to transcript an image and produces something that is to adult organ of visions an absolute failure, a mindless mes His lackadaisical mark-making was also influenced through the graffiti-inspired paintings of Cy Twombly which he had seen in 1960[3]