calendario eventi  :: 

X

8/11/2014

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010

Tate Modern, London

Sigmar Polke was one of the most insatiably experimental artists of the twentieth century.

This retrospective is the first to bring together the unusually broad range of media he worked with during his five-decade career – not only painting, drawing, photography, film and sculpture, but also notebooks, slide projections and photocopies. He worked in off-the-wall materials ranging from meteor dust to gold, bubble wrap, snail juice, potatoes, soot and even uranium, all the while resisting easy categorisation.

Polke’s relentlessly inventive works range in size from the intimacy of a notebook to monumental paintings. He took a wildly different approach to art-making, from his responses to consumer society in the 1960s to his interest in travel, drugs and communal living in the 1970s and his increasingly experimental practice after 1980.

Beneath Polke’s irreverent wit, promiscuous intelligence, and chance operations lay a deep scepticism of all authority. It would be impossible to understand this attitude, and the creativity that grew out of it, without considering Polke’s biography and its setting. In 1945, near the end of World War II, his family fled Silesia (in present-day Poland) for what would soon be Soviet-occupied East Germany, and then escaped again, this time to West Germany, in 1953.

Polke grew up at a time when many Germans deflected blame for the atrocities of the Nazi period with the alibi, ‘I didn’t see anything’. In various works in the exhibition, Polke opposes many Germans of his generation’s tendency to ignore the Nazi past, as if picking off the scab to reopen the wound.

The exhibition is organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with Tate Modern, London.

Organised by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director, The Museum of Modern Art, with Mark Godfrey, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, and Lanka Tattersall, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.

Curated at Tate Modern by Mark Godfrey, Curator, International Art, with Kasia Redzisz, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.

Catalogue
Containing over 500 illustrations and published in conjunction with the first comprehensive Polke retrospective (organized by MoMA with the Tate Modern)

Related events:

Film

Sigmar Polke: Films
Friday 10 October 2014, 18.30 – 21.00

The Beautiful Sigmar: Films on Polke
Wednesday 14 January 2015, 18.30 – 21.00

Talks and lectures

Painting, politics, persona: What Polke means today?
Monday 3 November 2014, 18.30 – 20.30

Purple and Snails: Polke's Experiments with Colour
Monday 17 November 2014, 18.30 – 20.30

Curator's tour and private view: Alibis: Sigmar Polke
Monday 19 January 2015, 18.30 – 20.30

Image: Girlfriends (Freundinnen) 1965/66 © 2013 Estate of Sigmar Polke / ARS, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Press Officer
Duncan Holden Call +44 (0)20 78874939 Email duncan.holden@tate.org.uk
Assistant Press Officer: Cecily Carbone Call +44 (0)20 78878731 Email cecily.carbone@tate.org.uk

Tate Modern
Bankside London
Opening times:
Sunday – Thursday, 10.00–18.00
Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00
Closed 24–26 December
Admission:
£14.50, concessions available
Adult £14.50 (without donation £13.10)
Concession £12.50 (without donation £11.30)
Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid
Additional booking fee of £1.75 (£2 via telephone) per transaction applies
Under 12s go free (up to four per parent or guardian)

stampa

permanent link