SIGMAR POLKE Biography

Born in Oels/Silesia (now Olešnica in Poland) in 1941, Polke's family fled to Thuringia, East Germany in 1945. In 1953 they moved to West-Berlin, then to Düsseldorf, where in 1959 he began a one-year apprenticeship as glass painter. From 1961 to 1967 he studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Duesseldorf under Karl Otto Götz and Gerhard Hoehme. His fellow students include Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (who later becomes the gallery-owner Konrad Fischer). In the 1960s Polke ironically and sarcastically comments on the bourgeois and political outward appearance of affluent society in innumerable drawings. The first public exhibition of his works was in 1963 together with Richter, Lueg and Manfred Kuttner hung in the Düsseldorf furniture store Berges, and he founded Capitalistic Realism together with Richter and Lueg. Working from 1963 top 1969, his first group of halftone pictures is created including Interieur , The three astronauts conquer the moon , Don Quichotte. In 1964, instead of using the traditional canvas, Polke begins to paint on printed furnishing fabrics and table cloths, and in 1965 creates the Richter Series, drawings created in homage to his friend Gerhard Richter. From 1970 until 1971 he held the post as visiting professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. The first retrospective of his work is shown in the Kunsthalle in Tübingen in 1976. The next year he became a lecturer at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and in 1978 moved to Cologne.

Source:
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