THE DAZZLER
by Jerry Saltz



Sigmar Polke, daring visionary lord of the alchemical phantasmagoria of painting, died at age 69 on June 10, 2010. Influential, independent and unpredictable, he was a giant of the postwar world, as significant a painter as Johns, Warhol or Rauschenberg. The contemporary American artist Carroll Dunham, in fact, says he’s the greatest of them all: "No artist of our time, and certainly no artist working on painting, is more significant than Sigmar Polke." Long may his maverick material glee, otherworldly power, anarchic inventiveness, offhand easy reverie and hallucinogenic imagination wave.

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