anna polke foundation scholarships 2026

The Anna Polke Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of two scholarships of €5,000 each. Supported research projects include those by scholars in the field of art history or related disciplines that reevaluate aspects of Sigmar Polke’s oeuvre from a relevant contemporary perspective. We invite proposals that explicitly and concretely explore Polke’s multifaceted body of work or include it as one of several artistic positions within the discourse of the chosen research question. Early-career researchers (students and recent graduates) are explicitly encouraged to apply.

Focus: Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW

This year, we particularly encourage applications for research projects that are thematically linked to the internation, interdisciplinary, and decentralized project Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW (2026) initiated by the Anna Polke Foundation. Taking Sigmar Polke’s celebrated Athanor installation in the German Pavilion at the XLII Venice Biennale in 1986 as a starting point, the project aims to develop new perspectives on Polke’s work based current discourses.

Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW takes up diverse aspects of this historical constellation of works and links them to our present. The aim of the project is to reflect on Sigmar Polke‘s contribution to the Biennale as a unique ensemble of works and to examine the inherent transformative, material aesthetic, ecological, and political potential of materials, media, and contexts.

Applications with research proposals relating to questions raised in connection with Athanor from a contemporary perspective are therefore especially welcome.

We also explicitly invite project proposals addressing the following research desideratum:

The conception and installation of Polke’s work ensemble at the German Pavilion were preceded by a photographic exploration of the empty space. Multiple exposures, overlays of incoming light, the pavilion’s architecture and details, as well as traces of experimental processes in the developer bath, reveal in the resulting photographs a transformation of space into painterly substance under Polke’s investigative gaze. Alongside this, these photographs constitute independent, unique works that should be considered within the context of Polke’s photographic practice and his unconventional engagement with chemical processes and image production techniques in photography.

A comprehensive documentation of Polke’s Biennale photographs—some initially published in the catalog and artist book of the Venice exhibition, and later forty unique photographs distributed by the Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach’s museum association—has not yet been compiled. Proposals aiming to catalogue these photographs, contextualize them, and reflect on selected aspects are therefore particularly encouraged.