Sale: 601 / Day Sale, Dec. 06. 2025 in Munich button next Lot 342

 

342
Sigmar Polke
Schreibtisch mit Akt, 1979.
Mixed media
Estimate:
€ 70,000 / $ 81,200
Sold:
€ 96,750 / $ 112,229

(incl. surcharge)
Sigmar Polke
1941 - 2010

Schreibtisch mit Akt. 1979.
Mixed media.
Signed and dated in the lower left. On firm wove paper. 99.7 x 69.7 cm (39.2 x 27.4 in). [EH].

• Explicitly vulgar, pornographic depiction - pure provocation, even in the late 1970s.
• In Polke's signature “layering” technique.
Sigmar Polke is one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Sigmar Polke is exclusively represented by the David Zwirner Gallery
.

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris.
Private collection, Berlin (1994, Sotheby's, New York).

LITERATURE: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, auction 6617, Nov. 2, 1994, lot 236 a.
Sigmar Polke in an interview mit Bice Curiger, Parkett, no. 26, Zürich 1990, p. 15.

Sigmar Polke is one of the most important German artists of the post-war period. His work is characterized by irony, media complexity, and a constant questioning of aesthetic and social norms. In the 1960s and 1970s, he intensively explored images of mass culture, including pornographic motifs taken from magazines, advertising, and print media.

Polke's approach to pornographic subjects is never affirmative, but always analytical and subversive. He transfers his relevant image templates into painterly or printmaking processes, thereby exposing the mechanisms of visual desire. For him, pornography becomes, for example, an ideological visual language that negotiates power, consumption, and gender. He is thus a pioneer of a thematic discussion that continues to concern us today.

Polke combines the erotic/pornographic with the political: the supposedly offensive serves as a mirror of social taboos and as a critique of the mass media's image production in a hierarchically structured consumer society.



342
Sigmar Polke
Schreibtisch mit Akt, 1979.
Mixed media
Estimate:
€ 70,000 / $ 81,200
Sold:
€ 96,750 / $ 112,229

(incl. surcharge)

 


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