Fenster – Windows: Grossmünster Zürich
Sigmar Polke
Parkett
German, English
Essays by Gottfried Boehm, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Bice Curiger, Ulrich Gerster, Regine Helbling, Claude Lambert, Urs Rickenbach, Käthi La Roche, Katharina Schmidt, and Marina Warner.
Hardcover
208 pages
215 x 300 mm
2010
ISBN 9783907582275
At the end of 2009 Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) completed a series of twelve windows for the Grossmunster cathedral in Zurich, setting new standards for the mutual relationship between art and church. One group of seven Romanesque windows shows luminous ‘mosaics’ of thinly sliced agate, some of it artificially coloured, to produce pulsating blocks of back-lit color. Says Marina Warner, “the interior of rocks opens not only on unexpected colours … on once imprisoned now scintillating rays and gleams, but it also tunnels into the past, into the distant past of geological and cosmological millennia.” For the remaining five windows, Polke designed images of figures from the old testament, based on medieval illuminations, which have themselves undergone transformation in the course of their long journey through time. Polke’s figures now appear as radiantly contemporary icons created in coloured glass, using a variety of traditional and customised techniques devised especially for this project.
(source: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/36374/new-book-on-sigmar-polke-s-windows-for-the-zurich-grossmunster/)
About the Artist
Sigmar Polke (b. 1941, Poland) was a German painter and photographer. Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years of his life, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.
(source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sigmar-polke-2213)
About the Publisher
Parkett is a publisher, library, archive and small museum. Between 1984 and 2017, they published collaborations with over 300 artists. All collaborating artists also created an editioned artwork, whose form could take any shape; from prints, sculptures, installations, media works, to paintings and drawings.
parkettart.com
