Polke was born in East Germany in 1941. At the age of twelve he moved to Dusseldorf, where he studied at the Kunstakademie and produced his first work. Although his work is contemporaneous to American Pop art, Polke demonstrates a different relationship to consumerism than his American counterparts. Rather than showing the glories of modern life, he distorts or disrupts the ready-made iconography, filling it with a personal message. Exhibitions of drawings have been organized in Europe; they have never been fully shown to an American audience.

If you want consistency in an artist, you will never find it in Polke. His imagination i

In the 1970's-were printed while he was high on LSD or psychedelic mushrooms. His alterations of usual darkroom procedures result in prints notable for unforeseen streaks and blotches. Most of the series at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles are based on Polke's travels. One series was made in a Brazilian gay bar, another in an Afghani opium den, and a third shows a vicious dog and bear fight.

mother and child, man and woman, or heads of state. They are translated as silhouettes portraying a false togetherness. Drawings with the "ghost" themes show the folk spirit of his potato heads, metamorphosed into the immaterial spirit.

s sardonic wit and eclectic creative process that have made him one of the most stimulating artists of his generation. Polke has experimented with various styles in modern art ranging from grisaille portraits of furniture, interiors of houses, building exteriors and hand-painted rasters of dots. Polke didn't have the best of materials-usually ballpoint pen on newsprint, sometimes with watercolor or colored pencil-he drew bits and pieces of cartoons and advertisements. Polke also used dots in his works, throwing dot and circle patterns into different pictures. An example Polke did was an Oswald portrait, which was

Between 1971 and the early 1980s Polke didn't produce much work. Museums were only showing a couple of paintings in shows as opposed to 11 to 18. In the 1980s Polke put his art back on track with powerful and moving paintings on patterned fabric. Works such as Paganini (1982), The Living Stink (1983) and Watchtower (1984). In these works Polke brings together the Pop imagery of the 1960s drawings with the hallucinatory energy of the "Ride on the Eight of Infinity" series.

Polke depends on the visuals from all manner of sources like comic books and ads from news. His work has a since of rambling to it not making sense. Filippo Marinetti, leader of the Italian Futurists 90 years ago, called himself "the caffeine of Europe," so later Polke drew a glass tube with powder spilling out of it and titled it Polke as a Drug, 1968.

One of the "Raster Drawings," most of which employ anonymous figures that supplement the dots with linear elements. Polke's funky means of reproducing found imagery is different from Warhol's silkscreen process or Lichtenstein's dot screens created by stencil. Polke also made entire images from halftone dots, while Lichtenstein used dot screens.

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