Sigmar Polke. Music from an Unknown Source

Since the early 1960s a main interest of Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was the relationship between the reality as contained in a picture, and reality itself; the relationship between art and daily life. Here, he often took up an ironic, distanced position, which enabled him to direct his attention – above and beyond issues of content – to the form and the materiality of painting.In the gouaches presented in this exhibition, Polke starts from the watery consistency of gouache and makes his theme the dripping and flowing of paint. Letting physical phenomena happen in a controlled or uncon-trolled way is something that was important to Polke. As an antipole to the unpredictable flow of paint — this was typical of Polke — the artist overlaid it with a regular and predictable grid system. Further, he gave the paintings names that sound absurd, but which add poetic nuances to what is depicted and are exemplary of Polke’s overall artistic position.