Age, Biography and Wiki

Sigmar Polke was born on 13 February, 1941 in Oels, Germany, (now Oleśnica, Poland), is a German painter. Discover Sigmar Polke's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Learn How rich is he in this year and how he spends money? Also learn how he earned most of networth at the age of 69 years old?

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Occupation N/A
Age 69 years old
Zodiac Sign Aquarius
Born 13 February, 1941
Birthday 13 February
Birthplace Oels, Germany, (now Oleśnica, Poland)
Date of death 10 June, 2010
Died Place Cologne, Germany
Nationality Germany

We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on 13 February. He is a member of famous painter with the age 69 years old group.

Sigmar Polke Height, Weight & Measurements

At 69 years old, Sigmar Polke height not available right now. We will update Sigmar Polke's Height, weight, Body Measurements, Eye Color, Hair Color, Shoe & Dress size soon as possible.

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Dating & Relationship status

He is currently single. He is not dating anyone. We don't have much information about He's past relationship and any previous engaged. According to our Database, He has no children.

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Sigmar Polke Net Worth

His net worth has been growing significantly in 2023-2024. So, how much is Sigmar Polke worth at the age of 69 years old? Sigmar Polke’s income source is mostly from being a successful painter. He is from Germany. We have estimated Sigmar Polke's net worth, money, salary, income, and assets.

Net Worth in 2024 $1 Million - $5 Million
Salary in 2024 Under Review
Net Worth in 2023 Pending
Salary in 2023 Under Review
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Source of Income painter

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Timeline

1941

Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer.

Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials.

1945

He fled with his family to Thuringia in 1945, during the expulsion of Germans after World War II.

1953

His family escaped from the Communist regime in East Germany in 1953, traveling first to West Berlin and then to West Germany Rhineland.

1959

Upon his arrival in West Germany, in Willich near Krefeld, Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory in Düsseldorf between 1959 and 1960, before entering the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Arts Academy) at age twenty.

1960

During the 1960s, Düsseldorf, in particular, was a prosperous, commercial city and an important centre of artistic activity.

His creative output during this time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere, demonstrate most vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and subversive approach in his drawings, watercolors, and gouaches produced during the 1960s and 1970s.

Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions.

1961

From 1961 to 1967 he studied at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy under Karl Otto Götz, Gerhard Hoehme and deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys.

He began his creative output during a time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere.

1963

In 1963, Polke founded the painting movement "Kapitalistischer Realismus"

("Capitalist realism") with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer (alias Konrad Lueg as artist).

It is an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising.

This title also referred to the realist style of art known as "Socialist Realism", then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union and its satellites (from one of which Polke had fled with his family), but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art "doctrine" of western capitalism.

He also participated in "Demonstrative Ausstellung", a store-front exhibition in Düsseldorf with Manfred Kuttner, Lueg, and Richter.

Essentially a self-taught photographer, Polke spent the next three years painting, experimenting with filmmaking and performance art.

1966

In 1966–68, during his most conceptual period, Polke used a Rollei camera to capture ephemeral arrangements of objects in his home and studio.

1968

In 1968, the year after he left the art academy, Polke published these images as a portfolio of 14 photographs of small sculptures he had made from odds and ends—buttons, balloons, a glove.

From 1968 to 1971, he completed several films and took thousands of photographs, most of which he could not afford to print.

In works such as Carl Andre in Delft (1968), the Propellerfrau (1969) or, later, Protective Custody (1978) Polke used a canvas made of furnishing fabric, thus elevating it to the status of a visual motif.

1970

In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products.

In the last 20 years of his life, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.

Polke, the seventh in a family of eight children, was born in Oels in Lower Silesia.

In the early 1970s Polke lived at the Gaspelhof, an artists' commune.

During the 1970s, Polke slowed his art production in favor of travel to Afghanistan, Brazil, France, Pakistan, and the U.S., where he shot photographs (using a handheld 35mm Leica camera) and film footage that he would incorporate in his subsequent works during the 1980s.

1971

He produced an additional series of photographic suites based on his journeys to Paris (1971), Afghanistan and Pakistan (1974) and São Paulo (1975), often treating the original image as raw material to be manipulated in the dark room, or in the artist's studio.

Beginning with his 1971 Paris photographs printed using chemical staining to create works full of strange presences while under the influence of LSD, Polke exploited the photographic process as a means to alter "reality."

He combined both negatives and positives with images that had both vertical and horizontal orientations.

The resulting collage-like compositions take advantage of under- and overexposure and negative and positive printing to create enigmatic narratives.

With the negative in his enlarger, the artist developed large sheets selectively, pouring on photographic solutions and repeatedly creasing and folding the wet paper.

1973

In 1973 he visited the U.S. with artist James Lee Byars in search of the "other" America; the fruit of that journey was a series of manipulated images of homeless alcoholics living on New York's Bowery.

1977

From 1977 to 1991, he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg.

His students included, among others, Georg Herold.

1978

He settled in Cologne in 1978, where he continued to live and work until his death in June 2010 after a long battle with cancer.

1980

Returning to painting in the 1980s, he maintained his interest in alchemical properties.

In 1980, he began exploring Australia and Southeast Asia, working with materials like arsenic, meteor dust, smoke, uranium rays, lavender, cinnabar and a purple pigment from the mucous excreted by snails.

1995

Completed in 1995 in collaboration with his later wife Augustina von Nagel, a suite of 35 prints entitled "Aachener Strasse" combine street photography with images from Polke's paintings, developed using techniques of multiple exposures and multiple negatives.

Polke's early work has often been characterised as European Pop art for its depiction of everyday subject matter—sausages, bread and potatoes—combined with images from the mass media.

His "Rasterbilder" from that period are works that exploit the raster-dot technique of printing as a way as of subverting and bringing into question the apparent truth, validity and purpose of the media images that his paintings appropriate.

He imitated the dotted effect of commercial newsprint by painstakingly painting each dot with the rubber at the end of a pencil.