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Untitled

1975
Not on view
One of the most provocative artists of postwar Europe, Sigmar Polke has created works critical of Western culture since 1963, when he and fellow artist Gerhard Richter began using photography as the basis for paintings that satirized the look and message of consumer culture. Since that time Polke has continued to use photography as the breeding ground for innovation.


During the 1970s Polke painted little but traveled widely with his camera—to Paris, New York, Brazil, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His subjects were night life, low life, the underworld, and the Third World—arenas in which life is lived in defiance or ignorance of established Western social rules. The basis of this image is one of a series of negatives exposed in a bar in São Paolo, Brazil, showing a group of men drinking.


Polke considers the darkroom a sort of alchemic laboratory in which he can explore infinite mutations of imagery. With the negative in his enlarger, the artist developed this large sheet selectively, pouring on photographic solutions and repeatedly creasing and folding wet paper. The resulting abstract organic forms thus issue from and reexpress the boozy, convivial energy of the scene.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Untitled
  • Artist: Sigmar Polke (German, Olésnica (Oels) 1941–2010 Cologne)
  • Date: 1975
  • Medium: Gelatin silver print
  • Dimensions: 104.5 x 135.5cm (41 1/8 x 53 3/8in.)
    Frame: 127 × 156.2 cm (50 × 61 1/2 in.)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, David T. Schiff, Lila Acheson Wallace, Harriette and Noel Levine, and Nancy and Edwin Marks Gifts, 1992
  • Object Number: 1992.5154
  • Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

More Artwork

More Artwork
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Girlfriends I (Freundinnen I), Sigmar Polke German, Offset lithograph
Girlfriends I (Freundinnen I)
Sigmar Polke
Galerie h
1967
Opinion makes a loop, a car could have done it too, Sigmar Polke German, Graphite and blue porous-point pen on paper
Opinion makes a loop, a car could have done it too
Sigmar Polke
ca. 1968–69
Untitled, Sigmar Polke German, Watercolor and opaque watercolor on graph paper
Untitled
Sigmar Polke
1968
Young Peas, Sigmar Polke German, Black ballpoint pen with traces of white glossy paint on paper
Young Peas
Sigmar Polke
1963
Untitled, Sigmar Polke German, Watercolor on paper
Untitled
Sigmar Polke
1982

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