Sigmar Polke is known for founding the “Capitalist Realism” movement with Gerhard Richter, Wolf Vostell, and Konrad Lueg, an initiative that appropriated the aesthetics of Western corporate capitalism to critique its underlying ideology. Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish constituted the first museum retrospective of the artist’s photography-based works, from his early documentary photos to his later, painterly experiments with photographic manipulation. Comprising one hundred and twenty works from the mid-1960s to 1995, the exhibition included key series such as Paris (1971), the first of Polke’s photo manipulations and the first in a suite of works taken from journeys around the world. Other major series included Goya, the Old Women (1984), based on photos of the titular painting, and Aachener Strasse (1995), a sixty-piece collaboration with Augustina von Nagel that combined street photos with images of his and her earlier art.
To produce these fantastical photoworks, Polke used chemical staining, multiple exposures, solarization, overprinting, and hand-painting, often while under the influence of LSD.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.
After its run at MOCA Grand Avenue, the exhibition traveled to Site Santa Fe and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish was organized by Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.