“For Sigmar Polke the camera may be only a tool, ”like a pencil or a brush“, but photography itself, the medium and the process, is vital magic of the utmost importance. Photography is a way of making pictures that comes with a hidden bag of tricks – chemical irritants, sleight-of-eye potions, and complex manipulations – that Polke applies to arouse the soul of things. His appreciation of photography’s magic flies in the face of a general reverence for the fidelity and finitude of photographs; but his irreverence is salutary, for it recognises and returns to the medium its amazing transformative power, a power that is taken for granted today but which dazzled the world at its birth.”

Maria Morris Hambourg – Sigmar Polke, When Pictures Vanish: Photoworks

“Does meaning generate relationships or do relationships generate meaning?”

Sigmar Polke

“Equally impressive are its achievements in the sphere of immaterial production. The organisations of the superstructure are everywhere occupied by members of our class, and all “fashions”, “trends” and “movements” that occur in highly industrialised societies have been inspired, supported and inculcated by the petty bourgeoisie: from tourism to do-it-yourself, from avant garde art to urban studies, from the student movement to ecology, from cybernetics to feminism, from competitive sports to the “sexual revolution”, and so on and so forth. Every alternative movement in our culture has been promptly disarmed and absorbed by the petty bourgeoisie…”

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, On The Inevitability of the Petty Bourgeoisie: A Sociological Caprice, 1976

“Day by day they take some brain away…”

David Bowie, All the Madmen

“What you see you don’t see.”

Sigmar Polke