German - Artist | February 13, 1941 - June 10, 2010
Light is a metaphoric thing. There is green light and red light. Then there is black light, which is mostly danger.
Sigmar Polke
LightRedGreenBlackDangerThen
The conventional definition of reality, and the idea of 'normal life', mean nothing.
LifeRealityNothingMeanNormal
A negative is never finished.
NegativeNeverFinished
We were very poor and my family lost everything during the war - our home and our identity. But I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.
FamilyHomeOpportunityWarIdentity
I've never been interested in philosophy, but some of Jung's ideas seem useful in helping people understand pictures and so forth.
PeopleIdeasPhilosophyPictures
By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.
AdvertisingFaceRealityLearnYou
As a child, I copied Duerer drawings and Bruegel.
ChildCopiedDrawings
Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.
MyselfThoughtsWillOutExperiments
Picabia is a very old painter who some people try to connect me to, but I refuse such comparisons very well.
PeopleMeTrySome PeopleOldWell
There has to be an element of risk-taking for me in my work.
WorkMeElementRisk-Taking
When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.
ArtYoungRenaissanceInterested
I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.
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