This autumn, Tate Modern presents a major retrospective of work by the late German artist Sigmar Polke. Prepare to be baffled, even if you do know who he is, which is reasonably unlikely. Bewilderment is a perfectly natural response to Polke’s work. This mercurial creator — cleverer, wittier, more wildly experimental, more waywardly subversive, more wilfully capricious than any of his peers — had a mind like a one-man laboratory. It bubbled and seethed with mad plans for new ways to make images. Before he arrived on the scene, people were sure that it was all over for painting. In Polke they found a maverick to make them rethink.
Where so many artists tend to discover a style and then steadily pursue it through endless