Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois!: Comrades and Contemporaries: The 1970s - Tapa dura

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.