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Sigmar Polke

Exhibition — Couvent des Jacobins

sigmar polke, forêt nationale (national forest), 1989

private collection, france

Born in 1941 in Oels (Poland), he lives in Cologne (Germany).

 

Sigmar Polke is an artist par excellence who submits painting (and the image) to an incessant vertigo, forcing both his ends and his means to undergo a permanent revolution. He ceaselessly disturbs art's foundations, history, and techniques, to the point of altering its nature as a system of representation. A legendary alchemist (he has made use of unstable and dangerous materials in his art), Polke creates in the viewer, with his telepathic gifts, a reversal of the visible and the invisible, of material and spirit. The canvas is only the threshold of a vision marked by disorder and irrationality. Painting proceeds, for Polke, from "a consciousness of the contours of the tornado" (B. Lamarche-Vadel).

 

The works collected together at Les Jacobins are based on the subject of the French Revolution, to which Polke has dedicated a series of paintings, plunging himself into the turpitude of the past in order to bring it to the surface of the present.