Sigmar Polke: scrubbing the ‘bad dad’

In 2014, writing on the occasion of a major travelling retrospective of Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), Jutta Koether characterised the German artist as a ‘bad dad’: ‘a type of artist who refused to be pigeonholed and who performed, practiced, rather than being seen doing painting in a classic sense. But who never stopped maltreating painting’.¹ Polke’s ‘maltreatment’ of painting takes centre stage in Der heimische Waldboden. Höhere Wesen befahlen: Polke zeigen! (The Native Forest Floor. Higher Powers Command: Show Polke!), a concise survey curated by Bice Curiger at the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin.² Run by the artist Nina Pohl (b.1978), the gallery is an unusual space, comprising a two-storey octagonal building designed in 1969 by Richard Paulick, a renowned architect in East Germany. Polke has long been appreciated as an ‘artist’s artist’, an assessment that is reaffirmed by Pohl’s decision to dedicate an exhibition to his practice. However, the limitations of the space, the modest selection of works on view and the absence of Polke’s challenging early works mean that the visitor does not necessarily encounter the artist at his ‘bad dad’ best.

Born in Lower Silesia, Polke grew up in Thuringia, living under the Communist regime in East Germany, before his family escaped to West Germany in 1953. His worldview was shaped by having lived two remarkably different realities of post-war Germany. He studied art at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art from 1961 to 1967 and, together with his classmate Gerhard Richter (b.1932), developed an alternative model of German painting that moved away from Expressionism towards an aesthetic that was closer to Pop. However, Polke’s distinctive form of Pop diverged markedly from that of his American peers, such as Andy Warhol (1928–87) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–97). Although he brought popular culture into his early paintings and drawings, he also parodied the goods and consumerist mentality that often defined Pop art. The exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon FIG.1, notably, does not include any of these droll works from the early 1960s. Instead, it largely focuses on paintings and photographs that the artist produced between 1968 and 2002, which are arranged in a disjointed display that avoids any clear chronological or thematic logic. While Polke’s humour is still evident in some of these works of art, the selection prioritises his conceptual approach to painting and use of unorthodox materials.

In 1984 Roberta Smith argued that Polke ‘seems like a missing link between Europe and America, between the late ’60s and early ’80s’.³ Such an identification of Polke as a bridge figure is evidenced by both his work and biography, and yet this exhibition offers insufficient context to convey this idea. The show is not accompanied by a catalogue and the available information is limited to an overview and a handout with short texts about each object. The curatorial intent can be found in Curiger’s brief introduction, which contends that Polke ‘broke with established conventions to renew painting in an experimental and humorous way’. Although the presentation emphasises painting and one can easily identify the artist’s experimentation with the medium, the notion of ‘renewal’ seems to position his radical practice as one that was clean and polite. However, Polke’s ironic and inquisitive approach to painting was significant because he made a venerated medium messy and open to contamination.

The ground floor of the exhibition brings together paintings FIG.2, prints, drawings and photographs, beginning on a political note with Ohne Titel (Dr. Bonn) (Untitled; Dr. Bonn) FIG.3. The painting depicts a faceless man, dressed in the attire of a middle-class office worker, who holds a slingshot to his own head. Behind him are images of Jan-Carl Raspe and Andreas Baader, two members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), an extreme left-wing group, who died in prison on 18th October 1977. This black-and-white vignette is painted on a plaid flannel sheet in a cone-like shape, as though the scene is illuminated by a spotlight. Also included in this gallery is Ohne Titel (Sicherheitsverwahrung) (Untitled; Preventative Detention) FIG.4. At the centre of the work a woman is depicted struggling to break free from two police officers grasping her arms. Much like Ohne Titel (Dr. Bonn), the work was made with a found support – in this case, a white tablecloth embroidered with pink flowers. Objects such as safety pins, razor blades, watch straps and plastic packaging adorn – or injure – the painting, materialising the notions of restraint and incarceration.

A series of films – ranging from an interview with Polke’s gallerist René Block to films by the artists Klaus Mettig (b.1950) and Ernst Mitzka (b.1945), which highlight the milieu in which Polke worked – are on show in a cellar-like space, before the exhibition continues upstairs with photographs and paintings in two adjoining galleries. Here, the visitor is confronted with Gangster FIG.5, which depicts a shirtless man smoking a cigar and wearing a bowler hat, shorts and a trench coat, a figure that alludes to the film genre that became increasingly popular in the 1980s. Polke’s gangster opens the coat to reveal an array of small box-like shapes, perhaps wares that he is selling or devices that are about to explode. For this large-scale work, Polke continued his use of found fabrics, combining a plain sheet with a patterned one to create the background. In the 1980s he also increasingly incorporated synthetic sealing lacquer, which he poured onto the picture ground, making it semi-transparent. One can see the through the gangster’s coat to the support bars of the stretcher, bringing the normally invisible apparatus of the painting into the pictorial realm.

This upstairs gallery achieves a coherence that is lacking elsewhere, thanks to the inclusion of a number of Polke’s conceptual works from the late 1960s. The artist’s dry humour comes out more clearly here, in such works as Telepathische Sitzung II: Sender: William Blake – Empfänger: Sigmar Polke (Telepathic Session II: Transmitter: William Blake – Receiver: Sigmar Polke) FIG.6. The work comprises two canvases that are divided into grids, with boxes labelled ja (yes) or nein (no); one is labelled ‘Sender: William Blake’, the other, ‘Empfänger: S. Polke’. The boxes are connected by strings, suggesting Polke can communicate with the ghost of an artist through the very act of making a painting. In Carl Andre in Delft FIG.7 Polke applied a fabric rectangle depicting an arrangement of Delft Blue tiles and wrote the work’s title in capital letters underneath. With typical irreverence, Polke refers to American minimalism, which was contemporaneous to but strikingly different from his own work, and transformed it into something maximialist, European and quasi-historic.

The complexity of the Schinkel Pavillon – which, with its octagonal plan, floor-to-ceiling windows upstairs and interior design idiosyncrasies FIG.8 is not naturally suited to the display of paintings – would have presented a challenge to any curator trying to show the breadth of Polke’s artistic innovations. Although Curiger manages to illustrate a broad range of the artist’s endlessly experimental practice, the achronological display – at points, organised by media due to the constraints of the galleries – can be detrimental to the viewer’s understanding of Polke as an artist. It must be noted that the absence of a clear trajectory was probably integral to Curiger’s curatorial conceit. In 1999 she wrote that, in ‘Polke’s work, there is neither a single, linear evolution nor, more importantly, merely an accumulation of disconnected output. Instead there is an extreme liberation, concentration, and the unflagging pursuit of knowledge’.⁴ On these terms, her approach ostensibly aligns with an effort to bring out the so-called ‘bad’ parts of Polke’s practice, albeit in a manner that is more inclined towards an ‘accumulation of disconnected output’. However, in this environment, his material and conceptual innovations seem to lack their characteristic intensity. Indeed, one was left wishing that more of the mess was left in the presentation of Polke’s pursuit through painting; one wanted the ‘bad dad’ back.