Les Infamies photographiques de Sigmar Polke — Le BAL — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 13 → December 22, 2019

Sigmar Polke — Le Bal Le Bal organise jusqu’au 22 décembre une exposition du peintre Sigmar Polke en photographe à l'occasion de la redécouverte d'un ensemble exceptionnel de tirages qui témoignent de sa pratique photographique intensive et de sa tendance fascinante à l’expérimentation.

FrLE BAL presents a unique ensemble of photographs by Sigmar Polke dating from the 1970s, an emblematic period featuring the artist’s first jubilant experiments (double exposition, floutage, solarisation, superposition…). They reveal Polke as an alchemist of photographic material, poet of almost nothing, free from all the rules of the medium and fierce chronicler of his time.

Untitled was the name Sigmar Polke chose for his exhibition in 1986 at the Schelma Gallery. One could describe just as tersely and categorically the entire body of photographs presented in this book and the exhibition it accompanies: hundreds of untitled, undated prints. Shots that remained over the years in a chest in the house of Georg, Sigmar Polke’s son, and had long since been forgotten.

Fritz Emslander, co-curator, Deputy Director of the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen

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Polke used the photographic medium early on, as both a documentary source for his paintings and as a means in itself. There is a reciprocal contamination of the two practices in Polke’s work, so much so that it is just as possible to evoke the photographic dimension of his painting as it is to speak of the pictorial dimension of his photography.

Bernard Marcadé, co-curator, extract from the text in Sigmar Polke’s Photographic infamies

The exhibition is curated by Fritz Emslander, Georg Polke, Bernard Marcadé and Diane Dufour.
The exhibition is organized in collaborations with the Morsbroich Museum.
A book will be published by LE BAL.

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