Fergus McCaffrey, New York, is proud to present an exhibition of Sigmar Polke’s(1941–2010) groundbreaking Photocopierarbeiten, or manipulated photocopies. This is the gallery’s third exhibition of that artist’s work, following Sigmar Polke / Andy Warhol: Drawings 1962–65 (2006) and Sigmar Polke (2011).

The exhibition features multiple sequences of unique manipulated photocopies and an immersive, large sculptural installation, all created between 1995 and 2002. Organized with the support of the estate of Sigmar Polke, the exhibition sheds light upon a new style of image making that would come to dominate Polke’s output over the final twenty-five years of his career.

Since the early 1960s, Polke created paintings and drawings culled from halftone images in newspapers, magazines, and books. He enlarged these raster patterns to expose the cell structure, or building blocks, of media representation. Regarding the rasters, Polke stated, “I like the impersonal, neutral, and manufactured quality of these images. The raster, to me, is a system, a principle, a method, structure. It divides, disperses, arranges and makes everything the same. I also like it that enlarging the pictures makes them blurry and sets the dots in motion; I like that the motifs switch between being recognizable and being unrecognizable, the ambiguity of this situation, the fact that it stays open” (Sigmar Polke: Alibis 1963–2010, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, p. 53).

Polke spent the 1970s polluting the photographic processes to extraordinary effect, and this deliberate corruption of the mechanisms of reproduction proved a foretaste of what was to come as a photocopier arrived at his studio in the early 1990s. Forcing error and embracing chance, Polke spent hours and days dragging and compressing, enlarging and reducing, found images on the scan bed of the photocopier to produce hallucinogenic extruded and contorted forms—pushing images to the point of obliteration. As John Kelsey has noted, a photocopy became a “hybrid medium somewhere between drawing and photography, a sort of electronic frottage” (Sigmar Polke: Alibis 1963–2010, p. 232).

This exhibition will provide further insights into the creative process of one of the most innovative and influential artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Polke’s work has been the subject of countless museum exhibitions. Currently, the retrospective exhibition Sigmar Polke: Alibis 1963–2010, which was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is on view at Tate Modern, London, before traveling to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2015.