Sigmar Polke Quotes

I've never been interested in philosophy, but some of Jung's ideas seem useful in helping people understand pictures and so forth.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

It's the procedures in and for themselves that interest me. The picture isn't really necessary.

We were very poor and my family lost everything during the war - our home and our identity. But I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.

There has to be an element of risk-taking for me in my work.

I don't see a big difference between painting and photography. Moreover, such distinctions mean nothing to me.

Because I was traveling a lot during the '70s, the only thing I could do on the road was take photographs, so there wasn't much painting during those years.

Yes, my works ... are enshrined in museums, but I don't care if the pieces fall apart in 20 years.

As a child, I copied Duerer drawings and Bruegel.

The conventional definition of reality, and the idea of 'normal life', mean nothing.

When I came to the West, I saw many, many things for the first time. But I also saw the prosperity of the West critically. It wasn't really Heaven.

When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.

People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.