Sigmar Polke valuation
Co-invented Capitalist Realism, painted on printed fabric, and used materials that keep changing.
Sigmar Polke was born in Silesia in 1941 and fled East Germany in 1953.
What a work by Sigmar Polke is worth
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Bio
Sigmar Polke was born in Silesia in 1941 and fled East Germany in 1953. With Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer he announced Capitalist Realism in a Dusseldorf furniture showroom in 1963, a deadpan answer to both Pop and socialist realism. He painted the printing dot by hand in the Rasterbilder, worked on lengths of found printed fabric instead of canvas, and from the 1980s used deliberately unstable substances — silver nitrate, arsenic, meteorite dust, lacquers that continue to move — so that some paintings alter with humidity and light by design. He died in Cologne in 2010.
Instability is intentional here and it complicates every condition report: a Polke that has changed may be behaving exactly as intended, and distinguishing that from deterioration requires specialist advice. Works on printed fabric are supported by material that was never meant to last, and light exposure is a genuine risk. The 1960s Rasterbilder and the fabric paintings lead the market. Polke was also a major photographer and printmaker, and the photographic works, often manipulated in the darkroom, exist in small editions. The estate holds the archive.
The galleries, Venice and Alibis
Polke's first solo exhibition was at Galerie René Block in West Berlin in 1966, and from 1970 he showed with Michael Werner. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and Tate Modern gave him an exhibition in 2003 and 2004.
The retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014 and came to Tate Modern later that year. With so much of the work deliberately unstable, an exhibition history like this one, recording how a picture looked at a given date, is useful evidence in any condition assessment.
Willich, the Rollei photographs and the Reichstag lightboxes
Polke was the seventh of eight children, born at Oels in Lower Silesia, and the family moved to Thuringia in 1945 before leaving for the West. They settled at Willich, near Krefeld, and he served an apprenticeship at a stained-glass works in Düsseldorf in 1959 and 1960, then studied at the Düsseldorf academy from 1961 to 1967 under Karl Otto Götz and Gerhard Hoehme, with Joseph Beuys a strong influence. He painted the dots of the Rasterbilder with the rubber end of a pencil, and used furnishing fabric as the ground for Carl Andre in Delft of 1968 and Propellerfrau of 1969.
With a Rollei camera he photographed small arrangements of buttons, balloons and a glove in his home and studio, published as a portfolio of 14 photographs in 1968. In 1969 he made the film The Whole Body Feels Light and Wants to Fly with Christof Kohlhöfer for Konrad Fischer's exhibition Konzeption/Conception. In the 1970s he travelled in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Brazil, France and the United States, which he visited with James Lee Byars in 1973, and shot photographs and film that went into the paintings of the 1980s. For the reopening of the Reichstag in 1999 he made five large lenticular lightboxes. The estate, in his Cologne studio, is preparing a catalogue raisonné.
Best auction results
- Dschungel (Jungle) $27.1m
- Painting, 1967 · New York · 13 May 2015
- Publicly reported
- The artist's auction record.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
