
Sigmar PolkeGerman, 1941–2010May one see it?
Chicago, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
Untitled (Landscape) is one Sigmar Polke’s many Rasterbild (raster pattern) paintings, which echo the mechanical printing processes of photography. By using a CMYK color palette (a color-printing model using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) and spraying acrylic paint through a stencil, he created raster-dots that are more visible than the image they make up, undermining the veracity of the mass-produced image. This landscape image, despite being secondary to the raster-dots of the foreground, alludes to 19th-century Romanticist and Impressionist paintings. Untitled (Landscape) explores the relationship between a seemingly soulless, mass-produced future and the romanticized, yet equally fabricated, past.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
1961–1967
The Düsseldorf Art Academy
At twenty Polke entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where in 1961–1967 he studied under Karl Otto Götz and Gerhard Hoehme and was deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys.
1966
First one-man show, in West Berlin
In 1966 Polke had his first one-person show at the Galerie René Block in West Berlin.
1968
A portfolio of 14 photographs
In 1968, the year after he left the academy, Polke published a portfolio of 14 photographs of small sculptures made of buttons, balloons and a glove, shot with a Rollei camera. Until 1971 he made several films and thousands of photographs, most of which he could not afford to print.