ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE TO ACCOMPANY SIGMAR POLKE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper, 1963-1974, the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus on this important period of Polke's oeuvre. The exhibition will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art from April 1 to June 16, 1999.
In the early 1960s, Sigmar Polke (German, b. 1941) invented an expressive idiom that was crude, humorous, outrageous, and seemingly trivial, with a social message that was obvious but often ambivalent. Inspired by the images and messages of modern urban life--which he recast and marked with his own brand of humor--Polke aimed to create art for a broader public than those he saw as the cultivated and privileged middle class. Few of Polke's works demonstrate more vividly his eclectic creative process than the works on paper of the 1960s and early 1970s.
The catalogue contains an introductory essay by exhibition organizer Margit Rowell, Chief Curator, Department of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, and essays by Bice Curiger, Editor-in-Chief of Parkett and a Curator at the Kunsthaus, Zürich; and Michael Semff, Curator of the Twentieth-Century Drawings Collection at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich. More than 300 works are illustrated in the catalogue, including small sketches in pen, watercolor, and gouache, works created with a dot-screen process, and pages from a dozen small sketchbooks. Several important and monumental works on paper from the early 1970s are illustrated in color for the first time.
Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper, 1963-1974 is made possible in part by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation and the Contemporary Exhibition Fund of The Museum of Modern Art, established with gifts from Lily Auchincloss, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.
Additional support is provided by Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky.
The accompanying publication is supported by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.
Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper, 1963-1974. Margit Rowell. Selected bibliography. 326 illustrations, including 299 full color, 200 pages, 9 x 11 ". Clothbound $50, distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, and paperbound $24.95; both available in the MoMA Book Store.
