Sigmar Polke's photographic infamies

" 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

Sigmar Polke's photographic infamies   

Unpublished photographs by the German artist Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), the 130 images collected in this book belong to the collection of his son, Georg Polke. They constitute a clear demonstration of the artist's jubilant, irreverent relationship with the photographic medium during a key period of his creation, 1970-1986. Throughout the pages, different genres and registers coexist and become contaminated. Sometimes it looks like a (family) album that you flip through, sometimes it's the images of a road movie that go by. And in the middle of all this, Polke himself, at the centre of this round of characters and places, activates it and brings it to life. 

This photographic corpus is accompanied by texts by Bernard Marcadé, Bice Curiger, Fritz Emslander and Harald Szeemann that replace and analyze Sigmar Polke’s practice in the artistic context of the 1970s in Germany. The artist’s voice is also heard through one of his rare interviews, conducted by Bice Curiger in 1985.