Sigmar Polke (1941 – 2010) is one of the most significant German multimedia artists of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition consists of 40 gouache paintings dating from the year 1996, which are typical of his work based on experimentation with painting techniques and research.
Since the early 1960s, Sigmar Polke was concerned with the relationship of the reality as contained in a picture and reality itself, the relation between art and daily life. In regard to this, he often took an ironical position of some distance to things, which enabled him to turn his attention – above and beyond issues of content – to the form and the material nature of painting. The exhibition Music from an Unknown Source gives insight into an artistic oeuvre which has a singular position in the contemporary art scene of today and is among the most significant of the German postwar era.
In the gouaches of this exhibition, Polke makes the dripping and flowing of paint his theme, originating from the character of the watery gouaches. The controlled and uncontrolled “allowing to happen” of physical phenomena plays an important role for Polke. Over the unpredictable flow of paint, the artist lays a regular and predictable screen system as an antipole – something very characteristic of him. Moreover, he gives the pictures titles that sound absurd, which in turn expand what has been presented in them, thus adding a poetic note, and which are exemplary in terms of Polke’s stance as an artist.
The exhibition is a project of the German Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations Relations in Culture (IFA) in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and the Goethe Institute in Croatia.
