Sigmar Polke

The Elephant in the Room

16th November - 31st December 2023

CLICK HERE to request a digital copy of the exhibition catalogue

CASSIUS&Co. presents Sigmar Polke: The Elephant in the Room, an exhibition of seven works on paper made at the very beginning of the artist’s career (1963-1965). Funny, scrappy, and above all curious in the most optimistic way, in this important suite of works we see the artist develop the vocabulary that would make him one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

While the title for this exhibition refers, on the one hand, to the drawing of an elephant in the work Ohne Titel (Elefant und Palme), and by extension to the type of exotic imagery (palm trees, platypuses) that Polke liked so much, images that most Germans could only dream of in the early 1960s, it also refers to the fact that in the current art market, Polke himself is a bit of an elephant in the room.

Much of this is the artist’s own doing: he preferred to dodge, poke fun and delight himself with new discoveries than to give coherent answers, take things too seriously or make the same work twice. No one would question the strength of Polke’s influence on young artists today, but one wonders whether he himself could have found success in the 21st century, when the interests of commerce and an aptitude for marketing take such precedence over curiosity and experiment. Then again, maybe Polke would have liked this image of his current position - the un-budgeable and unlikely appearance of an elephant in a room. Maybe this was always his strategy.

The Elephant in the Room will be presented alongside a bookshelf exhibition of early Polke catalogues and monographs, as well as a rare full run of the iconic Oz Magazine, in reference to the artist’s interest and involvement in the counterculture of the 1960s. An illustrated catalogue will be published alongside the exhibition.