Sigmar Polke

Highly acclaimed for his persistent use of unorthodox materials and his experiment across a wide range of styles and subject matters, Sigmar Polke was a painter and photographer as well as a founding member of the Capitalist Realism painting movement. Among Polke's most acclaimed paintings is Bunnies, a piece that uses the ‘dot’ technique popularised by Pop Artists such as Lichtenstein; succinctly showcasing Polke’s wry sense of irony, this painting on first appearances seems to depict an attractive group of women dressed provocatively in the style of Playboy bunnies, but upon closer inspection the faces of the women are grotesquely distorted by a set of coloured circles. Polke began to use a range of alchemical materials in his paintings throughout the 80’s - meteor dust, smoke, a mucous produced by snails, as well as varnishes and resins are among the properties he would mix with paint to create spontaneous chemical reactions, resulting in Abstract Expressionist pieces.