“Sigmar Polke”, curated by Elena Geuna and Guy Tosatto in collaboration with the Estate of Sigmar Polke, marks the 10th anniversary of the reopening of Palazzo Grassi.

In 1986, Sigmar Polke was awarded the Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice Biennale. With Athanor, his project for the German Pavilion, the artist developed techniques and motifs that would become central to his work, and which today, 30 years later constitute the thematic core of the exhibition: alchemic experimentation and political anxiety.

The exhibition at Palazzo Grassi follows a reverse chronological order and opens in the atrium with Axial Age, the artist’s last important pictorial cycle, created between 2005 and 2007. The 90 works on display surveys the eclectic production of the artist from the 2000s to the 1960s. His work intertwines the alchemical and the political, through continuous references to contemporary and ancient history. By bringing together the abstract and the figurative, past and present, the creativity of Sigmar Polke shapes an idiosyncratic, wide-ranging and manifold world.