Sigmar Polke Installation Shot 1995 Tate Liverpool
This exhibition is the first retrospective of the paintings of the German artist, Sigmar Polke, ever to be held in this country. It is therefore the first opportunity for British audiences to see the breathtaking range of this most mercurial of painters.
Polke has ceaselessly questioned the nature of the painted image: its conventions, its illusions and its manufacture. Here we see his sense of invention and humour, displayed in over thirty years of work. Amid a plethora of 'styles', Polke demonstrates a consistent belief in the transformative power of art.
The exhibition includes Polke's Pop-inspired Capitalist Realist pictures of the early sixties, his later, technically experimental works which use a full arsenal of materials - lacquers, pigments, paints and objects applied to pre-patterned, commercial fabrics instead of canvas. Also on show are Polke's most recent paintings in which the surface itself becomes transparent.
