One of my favorite artists passed away on Thursday. Sigmar polke was grouped in with a number of different movements , but always stood out as a unique figure. When I was a little kid and looking through books about pop art, his images would sometimes appear, but I found them really confusing as they were not like other kinds of pop art that I was familiar with.
Roberta Smith had this to say about him in the obit she wrote for the NY Times...
....his main achievement was to be an early and astute adopter of American Pop Art, belying its crisp, consumerist optimism with tawdry materials that added social bite, and with random splashes of paint that implied disorder and the unconscious. His paintings were essentially Conceptual in their skepticism about the very act of painting.
.....I couldnt have said it better myself.
Polke was proficient in many different mediums, but I am particularly partial to his drawings. the crazy juxtopositions and the way a drawing could turn from representational to abstract and back again, this reflexive quality I find really compelling. I never tire of looking at his work. The catalog for the MoMA exhibit of his drawings in 1999 is highly recommended.
You can read the full NYT Obituary here....
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