Ironic as it may sound, the name of Sigmar Polke, one of Germany’s best-known artists, is closely associated with what is often described as the ‘anti-art movement’. Originating in the burgeoning admass culture of the 1950s, this aesthetic revolution, chiefly led by Duchamp and the Dadaists, quickly caught on, and was variously identified as Neo-Dada, New Realism and Pop Art, categories distinguished by minor variations in their contents and ideologies.

Born in 1941, in Silesia, former East Germany, now part of Poland, Polke is one of the pre-eminent inheritors of this cult of the popular, along with illustrious colleagues like Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer. All three of them had featured in Capitalist Realism, a path-breaking exhibition organized in Düsseldorf in 1963. Drawing inspiration from commodities of daily use, the works of art that were included in this show opened the doors to a new perception — not only in Europe but also in America, where artists like Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein and others would soon go on to attain iconic status in the world of Pop Art.

So it is a privilege for Calcutta to be able to host a solo exhibition of Polke’s works, organized by the Goethe-Institut at CIMA (Music from an Unknown Source, till May 8).

The 40 paintings in gouache on display make up an intriguing body of work that Polke did in 1996. Although the thematic and stylistic continuities with Polke’s earlier work are evident, this collection is by no means predictable. Unlike the grim History of Everything, held at the Tate Modern in 2003, these images are charged with humour, mystery and a witty lyricism. The ghosts of Warhol and Lichtenstein are discernable in the vibrant colours as well as in the faces painted over with dots. In some compositions, Polke seems to be lost in a frenzy of brushstrokes and riotous colours, enjoying a free-play between figural and abstract modes. Here, one glimpses something of the gestural passion of Cy Twombly.

But beyond these visible dramas, the viewer is arrested by the quaint captions that apparently illumine the works. These titles are terse as riddles (Sphinx from the Collection of Sigmund Freud, Greek Terracotta, Southern Italy, 5-4 BC), pack longwinded theories in a nutshell (When it comes to images he only has a non-productive, receptive organ, and when it comes to something as complicated as telling a story by means of images, then his brain is simply not constructed simplistically enough), provide useful domestic tips (Flower water will not smell if you add a piece of charcoal; picture) or simply crackle with an in-joke, making intimately personal references to the past that can only be understood by the most well-informed viewers. If you want to keep cucumbers fresh for a long time, give them one coat ‘with thanks in advance’ goes one. The reference here is to a film that Polke made in 1969, where cucumbers played a crucial role.

However, Polke’s ingenious titles are not exactly illustrative of his subjects. On the contrary, the prolixity of his language runs forever at a tangent with the bizarre world that unfolds on his canvases. One is forced to surrender oneself periodically to a baffled amusement, or even to irritation, as the list of fussy advices on good housekeeping continues to grow (Women’s tips for women: Black silk underwear shines best if you wash it in black tea, not in water). Yet curiously, Polke’s work gains a startlingly contemporary resonance as it moves closer to the mundane and the familiar, archiving consumerist desire and bourgeois aspirations, while taking on the petty concerns of daily life with a radical’s acid wit. An outline of a perfect nuclear family (Daddy, Mummy and two kids) is inscribed through a mesh of Benday dots against a murky red background. It is tellingly named According to statistics, every German owns 10,000 things.

Polke sets out to understand the material world in all its complexity, to make it part of the internal logic of everything that goes into his art — erratic lines, smoky hues, cartoonish characters, a photo-real finish and carefully simulated settings reminiscent of a sci-fi utopia.

Yet there is little in his work that would either hold you long, or even make you yearn to return, to it. It feels as if part of Polke’s design is to produce the sort of art that, like the society and its trappings it critiques, also turns out to be ephemeral. You are meant to look at it, get the point of it, and move on — a typically consumerist trajectory forced upon your eye by the high priest of Pop. This is the genre of disposable art, one that captures “the tone and image of the modern megalopolis”, as the art-writer, Edward Lucie-Smith, said.