Sigmar Polke

The Audience in Motion
"Sigmar Polke -- 11th Rubens Prize of Siegen", exhibition in the
Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen.
June 24 - September 16


Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Unteres Schloss 1
57072 Siegen
Germany


Sigmar Polke has already received numerous prizes and is currently the recipient of a further prestigous award to now call his own. The artist is the eleventh Rubens laureate of the City of Siegen, which places him amongst some of the greatest painters of our time such as Morandi, Bacon, Twombly, Geiger, Freud and others.

Polke doesn't really require any introduction. His dot matrices are his landmark trait, but as a whole his work incorporates infintely more. The artist restlessly experiments with motifs, picture surfaces and materials. This fact is amply on display in his current exhibition in the Musem of Contemporary Art Siegen which features works that introduce a new element, the method of lenticular printing. The works' surfaces are transparent and undulated, causing the infalling light to break. This effect animates the viewer to stay in motion so as to be able to see different images according to the angle from which a picture is viewed. Polke is presenting over 80 works in the Siegen exhibition, 30 of which are new works utilizing the lenticular method and are to be seen for the first time ever.

Siegen is a small city between Frankfurt and Cologne in Germany in which the famous baroque painter Rubens was born. The award, which was named after Rubens, has been presented every five years since 1957 to a living european painter for his or her life's work. Parallel to the Polke exhibition 100 works from the previous ten Rubens laureates in the Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection will be on extensive display.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen was founded six years ago and has been directed by Dr. Eva Schmidt for the past two years.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Charles W. Haxthausen and Dr. Eva Schmidt and will be published by the Dumont Verlag.