"Sigmar Polke has constantly defied aesthetic boundaries in his work, extending the visual vocabularies of painting, photography, and printmaking through a mercurial working process. His investigations into the effects that can be achieved by embracing a vast range of materials, pictorial sources, and art practices have been highly influential to successive generations of artists. Within his wealth of material can also be found mystery—he is frequently called enigmatic, elliptical, obscure. Over the past forty years, he has created a body of work that continues to provoke and entrance, marking a significant bridge between the twentieth century and the twenty-first.

...Polke, together with fellow students Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, cofounded a movement that was coined “Capitalist Realism” in 1963. The term was a rhetorical play on Socialist Realism, then the official style of East Germany. Polke’s paintings of the period embraced banal subject matter and verbal and pictorial clichés of advertising. His “dot paintings,” or Rasterbilder, produced between 1963 and 1969, were hand-painted renditions of mechanically generated images (mainly found photographs), and were both a parody of and commentary on the slickness of mechanical reproduction appearing in American Pop."-Walker Art Center

Sigmar Polke, (b. 1941) is originally from Oels, lower Silesia, Poland and died in Cologne, Germany in 2010. He entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Arts Academy) at age twenty and was deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys. From 1977–1991, he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He settled in Cologne in 1978, living and working there until his death at age 69 after a long battle with cancer.