Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed

Francisco de Goya, Time and the Old Women, ca. 1810, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France.

Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed offers visitors the chance to learn about the work of one of the most influential names in contemporary European art and to discover the fascinating dialogue he established with the Spanish pictorial tradition, with Francisco de Goya as its maximum exponent. Two artists separated by almost two centuries, but connected by their disruptive and visionary approach. 

The exhibitionbrings together more than forty works by Sigmar Polke, including paintings, photographs and drawings, together with the magnificent painting Old Women or Time (1810-12) by Goya, from the collection of the Musée de Lille and presented here for the first time in Spain alongside its X-radiograph, an image that reveals compositions which particularly attracted Polke. This discovery encouraged him to experiment with new directions and offered him a source of inspiration to delve deeper into his own artistic concerns.

The route through the exhibition unites the legacies of two great masters, establishing a dialogue between Polke's formal experimentation and the symbolic charge of Goya's work.

Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed is the first solo exhibition to be devoted to the artist in Madrid, offering a stimulating dialogue between the creative career of this German painter and the indelible mark that Francisco de Goya left on his work and thought. Polke's encounter in 1982 with Goya’s painting Old Women or Time (1810-12) rapidly had figurative consequences which meant that his work was influenced from that point on with regard to both motifs and techniques and compositional criteria. In the X-radiograph analysis of Goya’s painting Polke discovered much more of what his intuition had led him to look for. This revelation of what is concealed reaffirmed his vision of painting as stratigraphic layers of time and memory. 

The effect of Goya on Polke and the affinity he felt with him particularly relates to three areas: the artist and the man, his artistic, political and social circumstances; the objectual and anthropomorphic iconography present in both Old Women and in its X-radiograph; and finally the painting’s specific pictorial technique.

The exhibition is not structured chronologically but rather through concepts that cross time, intersecting with the use of various techniques and revealing the creative complexity of one of the key artists of our time.