Mixed media

Polke layers different materials to create this collaged work, including wood, cloth, and paint.

Take a read

Here's another element of the work that draws the eye. This is a framed collage containing a newspaper cutting and a book cover, with the author’s name intentionally hidden.

Printing press

Sigmar Polke takes images from the mass media and prints them onto various elaborate combinations of cloth.

Coffee crate

Over a dull domestic interior, the word Kathreiner, taken from a wooden crate, refers to a well-known brand of malt coffee that was drunk in Germany during the years of the economic miracle.

Upside down

To emphasize his postmodern ideas, Polke savagely criticizes the artistic tradition by inverting his own name.

Polke or Matisse?

Signing as 'Henri Matisse' in the bottom left corner, Polke ironizes in this way on the need for an artwork to be signed in order to guarantee its authenticity and therefore its value.

Modern vs. ancient

Twombly was inspired by Greek culture, creating a modern vision of the ancient world and reworking it into a new form of visual expression.

The ideal screen

At the start of the 1960s, Twombly began using increasingly large canvases, almost as big as cinema screens, which were "the ideal shields" for hurling splashes, marks, threads, and lumps onto the white background.

Abstract expressionism

The artist translates the very action of abstract American expressionism into this work, both syllabically and ideographically.