Sigmar Polke was an influential German artist whose inventive paintings and photographs used non-traditional materials, like meteorite dust or detergent. The artist's wry probing of aesthetic taste is evinced in his work Alice im Wunderland (Alice in Wonderland) (1972), a painting layered with irony, psychological states, and fiction. “There has to be an element in of risk-taking for me in my work,” he once stated. Born on February 13, 1941 in Oels, Poland in the midst of World War II, he and his family were expelled to communist East Germany after the war. Growing up in the German Democratic Republic left a lasting impact on the artist, specifically the sensorial overload of consumer culture he felt after moving to West...