Sigmar Polke

During the late 1980s Polke discovered ‘ordinary’ copying as a new way to manipulate images. He ‘abused’ the photocopier by moving the images while copying and then possibly copying on top of these copies. This gave rise to disrupted and multi-layered images with their own dynamics and narrative. In Der erste Schnitt, for instance, the stick figure seems to be in combat with the structures on the right. In Der zweite Fall the compilation of contorted visual fragments evokes a dramatic story. And for Der dritte Stand (a reference to ‘the people’) Polke used, among other things, a nineteenth-century engraving about the aftermath of the French Revolution. With bright swaths of color he pulled the images together. By way of copying Polke enriched his own visual language. In Kugelsichere Ferien, an art supplement of the Süddeutsche Zeitung published in the same year, he fully exploited its potential: by copying and recopying his own ‘halftone’ drawings, initially based on newspaper halftone screens, he distorted the dots into drops resembling paint. And thus brought the process full circle.