Catalog of an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, Nov. 15, 2002-Apr. 6, 2003 and at the Tate Modern, London, Oct. 2, 2003-Jan. 4, 2004.

Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art explores the ways in which artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion. Endless Enigma takes as its point of departure Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s legendary 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which not only introduced these movements to the American public, but also placed them in a historical and cultural context by situating them with artists from earlier centuries. Presenting works from the twelfth century to the present day, this catalogue is organized into six themes—Monsters & Demons, Dreams & Temptation, Fragmented Body, Unconscious Gesture, Super Nature, and Sense of Place. Works included range from medieval gargoyles to twentieth-century works by Louise Bourgeois, Sigmar Polke, and Pablo Picasso as well as contemporary works by Michaël Borremans, Marcel Dzama, and Raymond Pettibon. Masterworks from the likes of Piero di Cosimo, Francisco de Goya, and Titian are considered alongside those by William Blake and Odilon Redon. Time folds and temporal barriers collapse when Damiano Cappelli meets Edvard Munch, and Salvator Rosa encounters Luc Tuymans and Lisa Yuskavage. Salvador Dalí, Sherrie Levine, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Kerry James Marshall—eight centuries intersect and, as such, this wide-ranging catalogue examines affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time. Organized in collaboration with Nicholas Hall, a specialist in the field of Old Masters and nineteenth-century art, this fully illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018. It includes new scholarship by Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, and J. Patrice Marandel.

Tentoonstellingscatalogus. Tekst in het Nederlands, Engels, Duits.Met biografie en bibliografie.

Ce catalogue d'exposition réunit toutes les dernières oeuvres de Polke, faisant le point sur toute sa carrière et toutes les découvertes de cet artiste exceptionnel. Depuis quatre décennies, il explore les styles, les thèmes et les matériaux et prend pour champ de réflexion le rôle de l'art et de l'artiste, contribuant ainsi largement au renouvellement de la peinture.

Sigmar Polke (born 1941) recently completed a series of 12 windows for the Grossmünster cathedral in Zürich, setting new standards for the mutual relationship between art and church. One group of seven Romanesque windows shows luminous mosaics of thinly sliced agate, some of it artificially colored, to produce pulsating blocks of back-lit color. Says Marina Warner, "The interior of rocks opens not only on unexpected colors... on once imprisoned now scintillating rays and gleams, but it also tunnels into the past, into the distant past of geological and cosmological millennia." For the remaining five windows, Polke designed images of figures from the Old Testament, based on medieval illuminations, which have themselves undergone transformation in the course of their long journey through time. Polke's figures now appear as radiantly contemporary icons created in colored glass, using a variety of traditional and customized techniques devised especially for this project.

In conjunction with the exhibition Alibis: Sigmar Polke, this unique evening brings together rarely seen films by Sigmar Polke and his collaborations with other filmmakers. Polke's densely layered and open ended films reflect the flood of observations that shaped his life and work. Georg and Anna Polke, Sigmar's children, have restored over two decades worth of film material, much of which was never publicly screened during Polke's lifetime. The rare films in this screening span the artist's life and work providing an insight into his studio, his daily life and family as well as his international travel and interest in other cultures. The films will be introduced by special guests from Polke's family who will discuss his relationship to film and Christof Kohlhöfer will also discuss his collaboration with Polke. -- https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/sigmar-polke-films.

Sigmar Polke_s ten-part series Wir Kleinbürger! Zeitgenossen und Zeitgenossinnen occupies a very important place in the artist_s oeuvre owing to the unique variety of figures, traces, signs and quotations from popular imagery it contains: echoes of _Capitalist Realism_ from the 1960s blend with precursors to Polke_s chemical and optical experiments with colour in the 1980s as well as the political themes that were to become increasingly prominent in his work from the mid-1990s onwards. As such it provides a panoramic view of art and everyday life in the Federal Republic of Germany in a period marked by hippie culture, the new women_s movement and terrorism. Taking the Kleinbürger series as its starting point, this book provides for the first time insight into the whole of Polke_s artistic output in the 1970s, a topic hitherto neglected by art historians. Films, photographs, drawings and paintings, supplemented by documentary material and source images, serve not only to illustrate the diversity of his work across a range of media but also to present a completely new _ as a result of being long ignored _ image of Polke in the era of sex, drugs and rock_n_roll.