Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer, born in Silesia, whose family fled to the West in the 1950s. In Düsseldorf in 1963 he and Gerhard Richter launched Capitalist Realism, a German answer to Pop Art, and he painted enlarged printing dots by hand. He went on to experiment with chemicals, poisons, meteorite dust and fabrics as well as paint, often with wry humour. His windows for the Grossmünster in Zürich were among his last works, and Tate holds several of his paintings.