"What interests me is whether one is above or below. Whether it is the top that counts or the superimposition of the layers. (…) There is an old Chinese saying that an overlay never lasts forever and that what is below cannot stay below forever.”
- Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke (1941 - 2010) is a German artist with a biting irony. Through a great diversity of practices, he paints a subtle and energetic critique of a consumer society in its golden age, without sparing art itself which has become a commodity "like any other".
A work by Polke is a place of tension in which the artist stages opposing energies. Everything clashes, materials, and subjects alike. The drawings superimposed in reference to Picabia's transparencies, the multiplicity of techniques he deploys on the canvas as well as his photographic work in which he uses double exposure, everything is dual in the artist's work and hindsight seems to be instantly superimposed on reality to thwart it.