Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was a major post-war German painter, photographer, and printmaker who famously co-founded Capitalist Realism alongside Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg. Known for his satirical perspective on consumerism, pop culture, and Western society, Polke’s work spans a restless variety of media characterized by irony, chemical experimentation, and a defiance of rigid artistic categories.
While widely recognized for his figurative and abstract paintings, photography and published editions hold a central, transformative position in his body of work. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Polke set painting aside to focus intensely on darkroom experimentation and travel photography. He approached the darkroom as an alchemical lab, intentionally breaking technical rules through physical folding, chemical spills, double exposures, and manual manipulation during development.
His editions, encompassing artist books, photographic suites, portfolios, and multiples, were a key venue for testing new visual concepts. Rather than using editions merely to reproduce existing imagery, Polke treated prints and photobooks as spaces to alter backgrounds, layer motifs, or manually modify individual prints, turning editioned items into unique objects. Significant publications like Daphne, a 2003 artist book featuring hundreds of individually photocopied and manipulated pages, and multi-medium prints such as Die Treppe von Cannes underscore his lifelong fascination with mechanical reproduction, image distortion, and tactile materiality.
