The featured pieces date from 1963 to 2009 and focus on the medium of painting with which the artist expresses truths about our world, while exploring the idea of a new kind of beauty beyond the conventional. Polke was always a keen analyst and commentator of his time. In France, recognition of his work became significant from the early 1980s onwards. Before Suzanne Pagé presented a major retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1988, the Bama / Chantal Crousel gallery had already exhibited Polke’s work, and in 1984 the French magazine Art Press published a long interview Bice Curiger had conducted with the artist, during which there were many allusions to Franco-German history.

From an early age, Sigmar Polke was interested in printed media images, their impact on the public, their circulation and their readability. At the start of his artistic career in 1963, at the age of 22, together with Gerhard Richter, he introduced Capitalist Realism, also known as German Pop Art, as a response to the dictates of the German Democratic Republic. The growing economy of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany and its bourgeois ethos gave rise to new visual worlds marked by consumerism, advertising and magazines, which Polke incorporated into his work in a playful and insightful manner.

The encounter between Van Gogh and Polke at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles reveals unexpected yet obvious connections, not least through the motif of the potato. For Vincent, this humble tuber is the symbol of a link to the nurturing soil, of the toil of peasants and the poor man’s supper, while for Polke, the potato symbolises the “antiglamour” of post-war daily life in Germany, as opposed to
colourful American Pop Art that glamorises the new world of consumerism. However different Van Gogh and Polke may appear, what they had in common was a positive attitude, characterised by a profound humanism and a desire to escape the conventions of mainstream art.

The title of the exhibition, echoes the slogan “beneath the cobblestones, the beach”, chanted by students in Paris in May 1968 as they tore up cobbled streets to build barricades in a protest movement for freedom which influenced Polke’s early works. The title also evokes a strong foundation in reality seen in both the German artist’s work and in that of Van Gogh. The two paintings by the Dutch painter in the exhibition bear witness to this: Peasant and Peasant Woman Planting Potatoes (April 1885) and Basket of Potatoes (September 1885).

This exhibition shows the seemingly erratic yet far-reaching and coherent progression of Polke’s work, which attracts and inspires today’s young artists. On the one hand, it showcases Polke’s famous 1960s works using the screen dots of newspaper images, and on the other, watercolours and paintings such as Reiherbild II (Picture of herons II, 1968), in which the technical mastery of the line—a kind of formal obsession—is ridiculed. Sigmar Polke thus deconstructed the classical painting process very early on. His surface was generally not a canvas, but a printed industrial fabric or a net curtain. If he liked to take his time painting a press photo onto the background manually, dot by dot, he also liked to pour liquid paint liberally in big splashes while laughing expansively—creating forms that permanently captured the unexpected, the random, the instant. Since the early 1960s, Polke also practiced photography. The exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles reveals the extent to which this medium influenced his pictorial practice—and vice versa. A series of photographs from the 1960s–1970s, which have never been exhibited before, can be seen alongside important collections of unique photographic prints such as Paris 1971 (1971) and Palermo, The catacombs (1976). Important pieces from the series of paintings devoted to the theme of the French Revolution will also enhance the visitor experience.

Mental agility and physical experimentation are characteristic of this artist. His work as a whole bears witness to an incomparable love of freedom—both personal and artistic— that never undermines a powerful belief in the communicative power of art.