Fergus McCaffrey, New York, is proud to present an exhibition of Sigmar Polke’s (1941–2010) groundbreaking Photocopierarbeiten, or manipulated photocopies. This is the gallery’s third exhibition of that artist’s work, following Sigmar Polke / Andy Warhol: Drawings 1962–65 (2006) and Sigmar Polke (2011).
The exhibition features multiple sequences of unique manipulated photocopies and an immersive, large sculptural installation, all created between 1995 and 2002. Organized with the support of the estate of Sigmar Polke, the exhibition sheds light upon a new style of image making that would come to dominate Polke’s output over the final twenty-five years of his career.
Since the early 1960s, Polke created paintings and drawings culled from halftone images in newspapers, magazines, and books. He enlarged these raster patterns to expose the cell structure, or building blocks, of media representation. Regarding the rasters, Polke stated, “I like the impersonal, neutral, and manufactured quality of these images. The raster, to me, is a system, a principle, a method, structure. It divides, disperses, arranges and makes everything the same. I also like it that enlarging the pictures makes them blurry and sets the dots in motion; I like that the motifs switch between being recognizable and being unrecognizable, the ambiguity of this situation, the fact that it stays open” (Sigmar Polke: Alibis 1963–2010, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, p. 53).