1941-2010

Sigmar Polke, born in Oels/Silesia, is considered one of the most important painters the presence. International exhibitions and retrospectives in San Francisco, New York, Bonn and Berlin as well as major awards such as the Golden Lion The 42nd Venice Biennale praises his work.

Together with Gerhard Richter in the time at the Dusseldorf Art Academy 1963, he proclaimed the "capitalist realism". They developed a specific German version of the American pop art with which she uses the Muff of the Adenauer years took to the grain.

Instead of Brillo boxes Polke adapted motifs from the Baeckerblume, instead of to work screen printing, he painted his raster images point by point with the hand. From the beginning, style and motivational quotes played for him an important role. He processed media images, illustrations, comics.

With wit and irony Sigmar Polke commented in his work the bourgeois and political appearances of the affluent society. Culture Minister Bernd Neumann praised Sigmar Polke: "He was a critical, ironic one and also self-deprecating observers of the post-war history and their artistic commentator. "