Sigmar Polke was born in 1941 in Oels, now Oleśnica, Poland, and became one of post-war Germany’s most innovative and irreverent artists. His work constantly defied categorisation, spanning painting, photography, film and installation. A co-founder of “Capitalist Realism”, he parodied both Pop Art and Socialist Realism, using mass-media imagery to critique consumerism and political ideology. Later, Polke’s experimentation grew increasingly alchemical — he worked with unconventional materials like resin, pigments, and chemical reactions to create unpredictable surface effects. His style was defined by play, irony and an unrelenting questioning of how images produce meaning.