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No artist has come up with anything to match History of Everything, Sigmar Polke's profound response to the age of Osama bin Laden, and this book does a flawless job of illuminating his headspinningly bold associative leaps. Solid reproductions and remarkably lucid essays by art star Dave Hickey and cocurator Chalres Wylie guide us through what obviously was a knockout show at the Dallas and Tate museums. Known as Richter's rival, Germany's abominable shaman spinning variations on Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, and benday-dot painter Lichtenstein, Polke makes more than mischief and "Polke dots" here: it adds up to a masterpiece.

The central image comes from a newspaper diagram of a spy satellite relaying the image of Al Qaida fleeing on horseback to CIA and RAF HQ and the US Army in Afghanistan. The picture rhymes with two 19th-century engravings, one showing a uniformed Frenchman astride a deer on a platform attached to a balloon, the other a German whose balloon is guided by eagles hitched up like horses. Today, machinery has displaced flesh: the steeds are earthbound, the balloons and eagles replaced by Predator drones, the balloonist's eyes with cameras and mechanical imagemaking. The halftone reduces the Al Qaida horsemen to a cartoon, then a still tinier inkblot. In his huge abstract painting I Live in My Own World, But It's Ok, They Knew Me Here, Polkefurther simplifies them into a blotch that resembles a flaw in a halftone, a mechanical artifact. It's all about patterns: in a painting of a halftone of a cowboy checking out a target, says Dickey, "the circular shape of the buckshot p! ellet, the pattern of circular holes the pellets make in the target, and the benday dots that constitute their photo representation flash back and forth in our perception in such a way that shooting guns, shooting pictures, and looking at pictures are proposed as analogous activities." This book teaches you a new way to see. –Tim Appelo ... Read more

Book Description

One of the most significant artists of his generation, Sigmar Polke came of age creatively around 1963 in Düsseldorf. His earliest expressive idiom was crude and humorous, its images outrageous, and its content seemingly trivial, but embedded in these works were subversive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, German postwar politics, and classic artistic conventions. Few of Polke's works demonstrate more vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and eclectic creative process than the drawings, watercolors, and gouaches of the 1960s and early 70s. More than 300 works are illustrated, including small sketches in ballpoint and felt-tipped pen, larger sheets in watercolor and gouache, and still others stamped with a dot screen process, as well as pages from over a dozen small sketchbooks and several monumental works on paper. This books was published to accopany the first American exhibiton of these drawings shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1999.

Edited by Margit Rowell.
Essays by Bice Curiger, Michael Semff and Margit Rowell. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

a real beauty
Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper 1963-1974 is a real beauty. A wonderfull cover and beautifully divided sections make this book fun to observe. The work within the book is strange and curious. A book which hard to abandon the viewer's eye, is this. ... Read more

Book Description

Since 1967, Sigmar Polke had created about 150 editions-a broad range of works that by turns paraphrase and experiment with his idiosyncratic oeuvre. This publication, which collects all of his editions together for the first time, is therefore not merely an afterthought-instead it provides a direct, central approach to the artist's work. Polke's use of offset printing in his early works can be considered revolutionary: this technique was used by few of the artist's contemporaries and was not acceptable or canonical until much later on. What's more, in his editions for the 'Hamburger Griffelkunst' in 1973, Polke tried his hand at working with velour-finished paper, a material which repeatedly triggered the printer press's non-stop setting. These works, expressions of the artist's love of experimentation, exploded the boundaries of graphic art. Compared to the more rarefied space of his paintings, these editions, largely conceived with communication in mind, engage the viewer in an exciting dialogue with one of the finest artists of the past fifty years. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Sigmar Polke : Photoworks : When Pictures Vanish
This book shows his master of the darkroom, making all his works unique to themselves. If you are into black & white photography and printing this book is a revelation of what is possible. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Solid
I just picked up the book this weekend. I read the articles straight through and must grudgingly say that Peter Scheldahl's was the most interesting. I had to bang my head against the wall to manage wading through the Chinese Alchemy crap, too much was made of the anonymity of the artist , and I wish somebody would do better than to just gloss over Capitalist Realism, but oh well. The book includes a good number of high quality reproductions. ... Read more

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Artforum International, published by Artforum International Magazine, Inc. on May 1, 2003. The length of the article is 1945 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Sigmar Polke: Dallas Museum of Art. (Reviews).
Author: Katy Siegel
Publication: Artforum International (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2003
Publisher: Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Volume: 41Issue: 9Page: 165(2)

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Washington Times, published by News World Communications, Inc. on October 6, 1996. The length of the article is 8096 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Sigmar Polke's vivid images of the pictures that vanish: Corcoran exhibit is trip to place of terrifying dreams.(Arts)(Art)
Author: Joanna Shaw-Eagle
Publication: The Washington Times (Newspaper)
Date: October 6, 1996
Publisher: News World Communications, Inc.
Page: 3

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from New Statesman (1996), published by New Statesman, Ltd. on October 20, 2003. The length of the article is 1324 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Polke dots: Richard Cork is impressed by an artist unafraid to shoot from the hip.(art)(Sigmar Polke )(Critical Essay)
Author: Richard Cork
Publication: New Statesman (1996) (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 20, 2003
Publisher: New Statesman, Ltd.
Volume: 132Issue: 4660Page: 42(2)

Article Type: Critical Essay

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