Environmental Threats: Sigmar Polke Paints the End of Nature

Abstract This essay sheds light on a little-studied strand of Sigmar Polke’s art: his landscape paintings of the 1980s and early 1990s. He had hitherto displayed little interest in the genre, but after visiting Australia in 1980 and encountering extensive pollution this situation changed. During the decade that followed, landscape would remain a major focus of his work, through which he conveyed his sense of nature’s standing in contemporary life. Central to this conception was his belief that the natural environment — understood as a domain independent of human activity — had come to an end. The 1980s saw a nationwide revival of landscape painting in West Germany, but Polke’s work has yet to be assessed in this connection; nor has it featured in the new, ecologically-oriented histories of the genre that are now being written. The essay contends that he warrants a significant position within both narratives.