An overview about one of Sigmar Polke's last major exhibitions, We Petty Bourgeois!: Comrades and Contemporaries
We Petty Bourgeois!: Comrades and Contemporaries was one of Sigmar Polke's last major exhibitions. It was a celebrated show, but a strange one. There was a mad jumble of competing themes and counter-themes: comrades, the petty bourgeois, psychics, and terrorists; consumerism and the counter-culture; high and low culture; and experiments in art, authorship, and carnivalesque creativity. In examining it, Andrew McNamara (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane) revisits familiar assumptions about art, criticism, and class. Thursday 25 July at 6pm. Image: Sigmar Polke Can You Always Believe Your Eyes? 1976.