Polke on Drawing

Sigmar Polke has said he relies on drawing "to fix an idea."


"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." 

"Why Can't I Stop Smoking?" 1964

66 15/16" x 47 7/16", dispersion and charcoal on canvas

These last two images are very large works on paper (gouache and acrylic) that Polke created during the 1970s, when he was a part of a satiric movement in Germany called "Capitalist Realism." Many of these drawings are like overlapped transparencies on spot color fields, and are a commentary on consumerism, politics in postwar Europe, and conventions in artmaking (because art is always about art, but I repeat myself). David Salle capitalized on this technique in many of his classic paintings:

Layering with David Salle

David Salle draws on pornography, kitsch, and even other art in his work, overlaying these images in deliberately different styles to call attention to his various reference points. When I was enrolled at SVA in the early 1980s, Salle was a sought-after studio painting instructor and I could not get a spot in his class. "Painting" had been declared dead by the art world, but Salle was continuing to make it important by drawing over his paintings with new indices of meaning.