Dispersion and pencil on canvas; 140 x 100 cm.
Polke was born in Oels in Lower Silesia. He fled with his family to Thuringia, in 1945 during the Expulsion of Germans after World War II. His family escaped from the Communist regime in East Germany in 1953, traveling first to West Berlin and then to West German Rhineland. Upon his arrival in West Germany, Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory in Düsseldorf , before entering the Kunstakademie at age twenty. From 1961 to 1967 he studied at the Academy under Karl Otto Götz, Gerhard Hoehme and deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys. In 1963 Polke founded the painting movement "Kapitalistischer Realismus" with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer. It is an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as "Socialist Realism", then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art "doctrine" of western capitalism.
Polke's creative output during this time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere, demonstrate most vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and subversive approach in his drawings, watercolors, and gouaches produced during the 1960s and 1970s. Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions. The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed, was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. It was not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils.
Polke embarked on a series of world travels throughout the 1970s, photographing in Pakistan, Paris, New York City, Afghanistan, and Brazil. From 1977–1991 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He settled in Cologne 1978, where he continued to live and work until his death in 2010 after a long battle with cancer. In 2007, Vienna's "Museum Moderner Kunst" held an exhibition of Polke's work that spanned his career from his appropriations of Pop imagery and continuing through decades of perplexing compositions and clever critiques to arrive at current works that employ a haze of chemicals, minerals, and paints.
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