Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke made work that refused to settle on a single style. He moved between figuration and abstraction, between irony and seriousness, and between conventional paint and unconventional materials, treating the picture as an experiment rather than a finished statement.

He was born in 1941 in Oels, in Lower Silesia, then part of Germany and now in Poland. His family fled west, first to Thuringia and then, in 1953, out of communist East Germany to the Rhineland. He trained at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf under Karl Otto Gotz from 1961 to 1967. In 1963, with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, he launched Capitalist Realism, a wry German answer to American Pop and to the official Socialist Realism of the East. From this period came his Rasterbilder, paintings in which he imitated the dot matrix of commercial printing by hand, questioning the truth of mass-media images.

In the 1970s and 1980s Polke widened his materials radically, painting on printed fabrics and producing works whose surfaces shifted through chemical reactions, using substances from resin and lacquer to arsenic and meteorite dust. He won the Golden Lion at the 1986 Venice Biennale and, late in life, designed stained-glass windows for the Grossmunster in Zurich, completed between 2006 and 2009. He died in Cologne on 10 June 2010, after illness, at the age of 69.

Critics treat Polke as one of the defining German artists of the second half of the twentieth century, often grouping him with Gerhard Richter as the two figures who reckoned most inventively with painting after Pop. The recurring theme is irreverence and experiment: the Rasterbilder are read as a skeptical interrogation of media imagery, and the later chemical and fabric paintings as an embrace of chance and instability that few peers risked. The critic Hal Foster and the artist John Baldessari have described him as an artist's artist, valued by other practitioners for his refusal to repeat himself. The 2014 to 2015 retrospective Alibis, organized by the Museum of Modern Art with Tate Modern and Museum Ludwig, was widely read as the definitive account of a career that resisted easy summary. Debate tends to focus less on his importance than on how to interpret work that was deliberately evasive.

Polke's market is concentrated at the top in his 1960s work. His auction high is Dschungel (Jungle), a 1967 dispersion-on-canvas Rasterbild that sold for USD 27,130,000 at Sotheby's New York on 12 May 2015, a record for the artist. The next tier of results is also dominated by the dot paintings and early works: Rasterbild mit Palmen (1966) made USD 21.5 million with premium at Sotheby's New York in 2021, and Frau mit Butterbrot (1964) made about USD 17 million at Christie's in 2017. His later experimental and abstract works trade across a much wider and lower range.

Polke's market rewards specificity. The 1960s Rasterbilder and early figurative works define the top of the market, while his large and varied later output, including the experimental fabric and chemical paintings, trades far more widely and less predictably. He died in 2010, so the body of work is fixed, and the estate is represented by David Zwirner. There is no completed catalogue raisonne; works are submitted to the estate's catalogue raisonne project, which places extra weight on provenance and on corroboration through exhibition and literature records, and the market has seen reported concerns about questionable attributions. For a collector, deep museum standing and a contained, well-known top tier are the strongest signals of durability, while the breadth and material fragility of the later work are the main reasons to weigh period, condition, and authentication carefully.