I think Polke emerges from this exhibition as one of the most exciting
and experimental artists of the last 50 years
constantly putting different mediums together using materials
that no other artist had thought of
The paintings behind me were made in Düsseldorf
when Polke was a very young man in his early 20s
and they show him responding to the beginnings
of consumer society in West Germany
He and a group of other artists called themselves
the Capitalist Realists
and they were really picking everyday things to make paintings of
things like socks, shirts, plastic tubs
In the early 1960s Polke started to look at
half tone printed images in magazines and in newspapers
He would photograph these images
and then project them as slides onto canvas
and meticulously copy up these dots
He would let errors slip into his process
You see lots of blotches and those are just where
the paint has spilled or where something has smudged
The potato house looks like a garden shed
that you might find in the allotment of a West German middle class man or woman
but instead of the potatoes being under the earth they're at every joint of the lattice
and I think Polke was interested in the potato, not just as a staple of German food
but also as a magical kind of thing
The potato sprouts all over its surface and this to me speaks
of the way that Polke had ideas in all sorts of directions at once in unpredictable ways.
We're now in a large room devoted to Polke's work of the 1970s
and lots of things happen in the '70s
He travels a lot, he begins to live on a farm where he is surrounded by a
gang of friends and he makes his works collaboratively
He also explores different kinds of drugs, especially hallucinogenic drugs
and the works behind me feature lots of magic mushrooms
Alice in Wonderland is typical of his 1970s paintings
that has lots of overlaid images
and he'd explore that in his films as well
In his first trip to New York he found the city in an economic recession
and decided to make images of homeless people
drunks, who were living on the bowery
He let the chemicals that are used to develop photographs be as present in the image
as the images of the homeless people themselves
So a massive shift takes place in Polke's practice in 1982
He begins to make larger paintings
and he was really doing a lot of research into pigments
sometimes pigments that had been banned
poisonous pigments with arsenic in them
or sometimes treating pigments in a way so that they would look different
and they're very difficult to make sense of, they are hard to see
and certainly when you're in front of them
it's never quite sure where you should be standing
But that is what I think what they're all about, they're about putting you into a bit
of a crisis when you're looking at the works
Polke had always been interested in different kinds of distortion of images
and in the 1990s he began to explore distortion and corruption
by using photocopiers
He would twist the piece of paper that was being photocopied
so strange warps would occur
and then created a slide from that which he's used to make a painting
and it shows a giant strange black figure towering over a crowd of hands
He used things like bubble wrap and meteor dust, snail juice
arsenic based green paints and so on and so on
But also film, photography, drawing, potatoes, measuring sticks, bamboo canes
He's also a very humorous artist but at the same time an artist who confronts different
historical memories, the memory of the Nazi period, the Berlin Wall
the crises of the world that he lived through