Sigmar Polke
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. 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.
If you own a work by Sigmar Polke
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.