P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Sigmar Polke: Music of Unclarified Origin. This exhibition, consisting of forty gouaches painted in 1996, is a self—portrait created by Polke for the Institute of Foreign Relations in Stuttgart, Germany. P.S.1 is the only New York City venue for this exhibition of work by one of Germany’s most important contemporary artists.
The work in this exhibition depicts the principal characters often seen in Polke's paintings: the mundane everyday world alongside political reality, comics and fairytale illustrations with motifs of the modern—'short cuts' of the picture world by which we are surrounded. In these gouaches Polke, the juggler of style, quotes himself sans ennui or monotony. He displays the panorama of his stylistic and medial versatility to the viewer and demonstrates the masterly skill and artistic perfection of his montages and collages in the arena of painting.
Sigmar Polke is a German artist who was born in Silesia in 1941 and has been living in Düsseldorf since 1953. Along with fellow artists Richter, Baselitz and Lüpertz, he belongs to the quadriga of the protagonists of German art. Polke was invited by Professor Götz Adriani, Director of the Kunsthalle Tübingen, to personally design an exhibition as a self—portrait. The invitation led to the creation of Music of Unclarified Origin in 1996 for the Insitute for Foreign Cultural Relations in Stuttgart, Germany.
Sigmar Polke: Music of Unclarified Origin has been organized by the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart, Germany, in cooperation with the Goethe Institut New York/German Cultural Center with generous support provided by the Würth-Gruppe, Künzelsau, Germany, and Lufthansa German Airlines with additional support from the Zaleski Family Foundation.