While still a student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Polke, among Richter and others, became a founding member of the school of “Capitalist Realism”, which sought to be perceived as an ironic take on the official socialist art school of the Eastern block countries as well as a critical attitude towards Pop Art and the western world of goods.

During this time, Polke creates his first “raster drawings”, which translate the various commercial and recreational imagery of postwar Western Germany when the economic miracle was in full swing. By magnifying halftone images and transferring them on canvases, he forces the eye on the surface of the raster dots themselves rather than on the original photographic image. Thus, paintings as the two “Freundinnen” (Women friends) from 1965 and dreamlike “Interieur” from 1966 gain an almost abstract structure of ornamental quality.

Polke’s drawings of that period provoke a similar disillusionment. He playfully combines ambitious iconography with low-key ballpoint-pen drawings on notebook paper and deliberately uses clumsy style or banal slogans such as “Warum nicht baden?” (Why not having a bath) from 1963 and “Sekt für alle” (Champagne for anybody) from 1964 to unmask reality.

Almost at the same time, Polke discovers industrially printed fabric as support for his paintings, thus elevating a minor mass product to high art: The respective pattern of a prime-store fabric becomes the background on which the motif develops, as in “$-Bild” ($-painting) from 1971 and in “So sitzen Sie richtig” (How to sit correctly) from 1982, where various fabrics and motifs borrowed from Francisco Goya and Max Ernst are combined to form a rich and allusive collage.

When Polke starts experimenting with dripping and flowing themes – he pours dispersion paint on his fabric support and tilt it to make the paint flow - his work gains a new telepathic and parapsychologist dimension, as can be seen in “Tischerücken” (moving tables) from 1981. Since the 1980s, he also uses photo-chemicals for his paintings and creates works in which colors change over time or in response to light and temperature.

This experimental or so-called “alchemistic” painting culminates in Polke’s transparencies that he creates since the second half of the 80s. Curtain cloth is stretched on a lying support and soaked with up to eight layers of artificial resins. Thus, the simple synthetic fabric becomes a mystic translucent base that allows the stretcher bars to shine through, as, for example, in “Gangsters“ (1988) or in “Weißer Raum“ (white room, 1994) where the crisscross of the wooden frame enters into an irritating correspondence with the painting itself. Sometimes, as in “Triptychon” (1996), he flings pigments between the different layers so that their particles form random clouds of diaphanous colors allowing multiple associative evocations.

The first retrospective that was exclusively dedicated to Sigmar Polke was held in 1976 at the Kunsthalle in Tübingen. It comprised the complete œuvre of the then 35 years young artist, including all paintings, fabrics and objects (“Bilder, Tücher und Objekte” was the title of the retrospective) created during the years 1962 to 1971 and registered them chronologically.