Exceptional Works: Sigmar Polke

Featured on the occasion of the gallery’s presentation at Art Basel 2024 is Sigmar Polke’s Quetta (1974), a group of thirty-one unique photographs documenting scenes and patrons in the opium dens he visited in Quetta, Pakistan. With formal qualities and an installation that embody the unparalleled experimentation and freedom of Polke’s practice, as well as his interest in hallucinatory imagery and unorthodox modes of expression, the Quetta images are considered among the most compelling of the artist’s entire photographic oeuvre.

Since the 1960s, Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) has been recognized for his influential multidisciplinary output of paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, objects, installations, and films. Characterized by an experimental approach to a wide variety of styles and subject matter, Polke’s work engages unconventional and diverse materials and techniques, as well as the use of ironic and humorous imagery, as strategies of social, political, and aesthetic critique.

An inveterate traveler who was fascinated by photography throughout his career, Polke began to fully explore the medium’s potential in the 1970s, when he used a camera to document his experiences in Paris, New York, Afghanistan, Pakistan, São Paulo, and other locales. Capturing scenes from these journeys, Polke produced several series of photographs that demonstrate his interest in the incidental nature and representational possibilities of photography, as the grouped images invite viewers to experience the subject in a continuous, relational way that mirrors the evolving social and psychological realities of the artist during his travels. In 1974, Polke set off in a Buick with two friends on a six-month journey via Turkey and Iran to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he took unprecedented photographs of groups of men at opium dens.

As the curator Kathy Halbreich has explained, “Polke’s interest in the history of consciousness, the force of the unconscious, and the surprise of extrasensory perception was always tempered by systematic doubt and argument, which led him to seek systems of knowledge from other cultures as alternatives to Western structures of power, representation, and truth.… There, he found liberation in the nonconforming psychological realities of the foreign and faraway.”