Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and Films

This beautifully produced volume is the updated and revised edition of Polígrafa's 2005 publication of the same name, which was designed and conceived in collaboration with the artist and includes documentation from his private archives. Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and Films is also the only publication to include a critical overview of the artist's films, and to examine the abiding import of Goya's painting, El tiempo de las Viejas (The Time of the Old Women), to Polke's oeuvre in general. (The new cover shows Polke photographing this painting in The Beaux Arts Museum in Lille, France.) Throughout, the volume demonstrates how Polke interpreted images of reality rather than reality itself, while also satirizing tendencies in contemporary painting, interrogating the role of the artist as author, dismantling the visual rhetoric of media photography and always embarking upon the most magnificent flights of imagination. Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and Films affirms the artist's oft-quoted observation that there has to be an element of risk-taking for me, in my work.