Word: sigmar
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...show of early works on paper by the German artist Sigmar Polke, which runs through June 16 at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, is a bit of an anticlimax. Much has been expected of Polke. He is one of the two painters--the other being Anselm Kiefer--who rose to the top of the enormously promoted pack of "new" German artists in the 1980s and remained there when others dropped away or became, like Georg Baselitz, with his crude upside-down figures, formulaic bores...
...also, in real depth, art from the Pacific Rim-particularly Japan and Australia-which other American museums currently ignore. That would be of more interest than the standard international McMenu of post-McModernism, represented here by such delicacies as a garish Jeff Koons and some enormous, effete Sigmar Polkes. A museum of SFMOMA's potential importance, in a city with its own rich art traditions, should have the best of the vin du pays. One hopes so, now that it need no longer be kept in the cellar...
From his German contemporary Sigmar Polke -- whose uneven but brilliant retrospective is now finishing its run at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and affords the utmost contrast to the work of his New York imitator -- Salle learned about hand painting his mass-media source images. And from the late paintings of Francis Picabia, he extracted (as Polke did, much more inventively) the banal mannerism of painting figures and things as though they were transparent, drawing them over the top of other things and figures...
...SIGMAR POLKE, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The first major North American survey of a restlessly eclectic German artist, 49, whose work ranges from Pop-related imagery through psychedelic fantasy. Polke's recent "alchemical" works incorporate materials (silver oxide, sealing wax, even rat poison) that change color and texture as climatic conditions vary. Through...
...this point, the show plunges off into the badlands of promotion. It contains things one is glad to see--the antic, sardonic imagination of Sigmar Polke, for instance, which has been reprocessed by squads of younger artists from David Salle to Jiri Dokoupil; or the blunt, strong images of Eugen Schonebeck, who abruptly gave up painting at the age of 30, in 1966. There is also a powerful group of sculptures by Beuys. But the artists who get the most play are those industrial-scale bores of the international art market, Baselitz, with his upside-down figures, and A.R. Penck...