This artist’s book documents the only two-man exhibition that Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter organized together. Their friendship began in 1961 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where they were both students and shared not only a similar background (they had each fled East Germany for the West shortly before the construction of the Berlin Wall) but also a strong need for redefining painting through a non-commercial and anti-Pop-art sensibility.

Their artistic philosophy, equally embraced by Konrad Lueg and Manfred Kuttner, crystallized in 1963 into the art movement known as Kapitalistischer Realismus. That year, Richter and Lueg staged Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism inside a local furniture store, positioning themselves as living sculptures on pedestals among the showroom’s design objects. The performance offered a pointed critique of bourgeois German life and consumer culture. Three years later, in March 1966, the movement found a new public expression in the joint exhibition of Richter and Polke at Galerie h in Hanover.

Held from March 1 to March 26, 1966, the exhibition showed Richter’s pioneering photo-paintings and Polke’s early raster-dot paintings, emphasizing the distinctive yet complementary ways in which the two artists challenged the conventions of painting. Richter presented works such as Flemish Crown, in which he used his signature technique of blurring wet paint to disrupt and distort photographic reality. Polke, by contrast, turned to the visual language of mass reproduction, manually mimicking and radically enlarging the dots of commercial printing in works such as Bavarian.

The accompanying publication was produced by gallery owner August Haseke, a fellow student of Richter and Polke at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, at his father-in-law’s printing press. Although Galerie h was non-commercial, the freedom to produce sophisticated publications was quite a luxury at that time. Richter and Polke made the best out of it: in place of the academic, conventional catalogue typical of the 1960s, they created a witty and deliberately chaotic artist’s book, weaving anecdotes and personal memories into a joint diaristic text dated October 1965:

“At the time, when we did the text, I was as close to Polke as with nobody before,” recalls Gerhard Richter in a recent diary note.

The text is accompanied by a series of photographs, some dramatic, some hilarious, including one of the two artists taking a bath together, offering an unusually intimate and irreverent portrait of their friendship. Short artistic CVs and reproductions of their respective works frame the publication, with Polke’s Schlafzimmer (1965) and Richter’s Onkel Rudi (1965) appearing on the first and last pages.

After the exhibition, the friendship between the two artists evolved in different directions, while their painterly rivalry came to be compared to that of Picasso and Matisse. Their practices nevertheless continued to intersect, occasionally sharing themes and pictorial strategies.

Decades later, the Gerhard Richter Archiv, part of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, acquired the original layout, unused photographs, posters, invitation cards, and reviews from the legendary 1966 exhibition at Galerie h. The materials were presented to the public in 2014 in polke/richter, a documentary reenactment of the exhibition held at the Albertinum in Dresden.