[POP ART AND FLUXUS – POLKE'S FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION AND HIS FIRST ARTIST'S BOOK] Sigmar Polke: Berlin Galerie René Block [Catalog for the exhibition at Galerie René Block].

Berlin: René Block, 1966. Octavo (21 × 15 cm). Original staple-stitched pictorial wrappers; [8] pp. with reproductions of works by Polke. Very good. Item #54816

Only edition of the exceptionally rare catalog of Sigmar Polke's first solo exhibition and together with “polke/richter” his first artist's book. Polke is “widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the postwar generation” (moma.o r g /calendar/exhibitions/1374, Dec. 2024). In 2014, MoMA presented a retrospective that was “one of the largest exhibitions ever organized at the museum”. Accordingly, the standard manuals state, for example: "With his unconventional and experimental approach to a wide variety of media and materials, his inventiveness combined with ironic skepticism and his subversion and blending of artistic conventions, Polke is considered the most important painter of his generation and one of the most influential artists of the 20th century." (On this and the following: Dietmar Rübel, AKL XCVI, 2017, p. 24)

Polke studied together with Gerhard Richter at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the 1960s and founded “Capitalist Realism” (Kapitalistischer Realismus), an independent, West German variant of Pop Art, together with two other fellow artists. What Polke and Richter had in common with American Pop Art was the painterly appropriation of mass media material. Above all, the screened offset reproductions of photographs from daily newspapers served Polke as an important basis for his large-format canvas paintings. With his pictures of sausages or vases, Polke did not shy away from elevating the consumer world of the "Wirtschaftswunder" and West German petty bourgeoisie to the status of large-format pictorial subjects. Characteristic of his photo paintings based on newspaper pictures is the strong enlargement, in which the picture grids themselves sometimes make the previously depicted object disappear completely. Polke enlarged the originals with a projector and then transferred the individual pixels of the print grid to the canvas by hand, reassembling them point by point. In the year of the exhibition at Block, Polke published the artist's book “polke/richter” together with Gerhard Richter with a text collage using the cut-up technique. In it, it translates as: “I love all dots. I am married to many dots. I want all dots to be happy. The dots are my brothers. I am also a dot. We used to play together, but now we all go our own ways. We only meet up for family celebrations and ask each other: how are things going?”

The René Block Gallery was the place in Berlin where Fluxus, Happening, Decollage and “Capitalist Realism” took place, where artists such as Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richer and Sigmar Polke exhibited. However, Polke's pictures provoked even those who intensively collected Beuys, Vostell, and Richter at the time. Looking back, René Block recalled his most important collector at the time: “He had bought pictures by Sigmar Polke, raster pictures, and when I then did the exhibition with Sigmar Polke, in which raster pictures and, as Beuys called them in the small catalog, ‘Stolperbilder’ were shown, he left the room quite angry, saying that he felt (...) he had been taken for a ride, and never came back. (...) he had a very specific idea of the social function of art and what position painting should take. So he had also very clearly structured this Capitalist Realism for himself with Richter and Hödicke and Polke. And suddenly these other pictures came along, these funny ironic pictures by Polke with the petty bourgeois rabbits, palm trees and flamingos or the ghostly higher beings, and he felt he was being made fun of. He 'stumbled' over them.” (cafedeutschland.staedelmuseum. d e /gespraeche/rene-block#rene-block-fn-24, Dec. 2024) The term "Stolperbilder" (Stumbling Pictures), which was important to Polke, was coined by Beuys especially for this catalog. Not only did Beuys consider Polke the most important artist of the generation that came after him, but he also appreciated the commitment of René Block, in whose rooms he performed his action “Der Chef” (The Boss), in which he prepared a room with grease, sticks, and other objects, wrapped himself in felt and finally lay down in the room with a rabbit. Ultimately, the response to Polke's exhibition was still limited; Berlin, unlike the Rhineland, was anything but an art center in the 1960s. Polke only had his breakthrough a few years later in Cologne. René Block ran his gallery more as an experimental forum than as a commercial space. (Cf. Günter Herzog, article in: F.A.Z. April 30, 2009).

Price: €4,000.00

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