The Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve has organized an exhibition that brings together a remarkable ensemble of artworks by one of Germanyʼs greatest contemporary artists: Sigmar Polke (1941-2010). The child of refugee parents, he was born in Silesia and lived in Cologne, when he wasnʼt travelling around the world. With his friend Gerhard Richter, he created the pictorial movement known as ʻCapitalist Realismʼ. In 1986, he was awarded the Golden Lion Prize at the 42nd Venice Biennale.

His undefinable artwork oscillated between figuration and abstraction, and embraced multiple techniques: painting, drawing, engraving, photography, film and installation. In 2014-2015, there were a number of large retrospectives devoted to the artist: at the Musée de Grenoble, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Tate Modern in London and at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, as well as the Palazzo Grassi, Venice in 2016.

Renowned for his wit, he once explained that while his family ʻhurried to read the newspaper, he, due to shortsightedness, saw only a series of small black dots that would become his brothers and after all, he was just a dot himself.ʼ From this memory was born the artistʼs ubiquitous use of dots. By enlarging the raster, he deformed it, playing with perspectives from a distance and up-close, leading even to the dissolution of the image.

The self-deprecation of this artist, who was above all else a free thinker, undoubtedly hindered his reputation.

Polkeʼs paintings are painted drawings: fields of power and energy, an alchemy of materials and colours. His narrative takes its inspiration as much from pop imagery, ancient myths, and popular tales, as it does from history and political satire.

His drawings are reminiscent of the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) card game: one form is transformed into another, generating a series of thoughts by free association, similar to the Surrealist game. In Figurenstudie (1973), one of the drawings exhibited at the Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, several figures are superimposed, fragments of bodies and female faces that lead us to a mental image: a fantasy of open, group sex.

The stuff of Polkeʼs dreams may be compared to a diary, a place of experimentation. The pictorial space becomes an immense collage where portraits, words, realistic elements and lyrical abstraction are juxtaposed, like an intellectual puzzle of sorts. The surprise effect fills his artworks with a suggestive power. His vocabulary bears the inflections of a childʼs spontaneity and a lively political conscience, as well as a cosmic dimension, inherited from German Romanticism.