Sigmar Polke

Galerie Thomas Borgmann, Cologne
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1983

Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Sigmar Polke: Fotografien, 1990, p. 142, no.106, illustrated in colour
Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Santa Fe, Site Santa Fe; Washington, D. C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, 1995-97, p. 160, no. 85, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey the reflective quality of the silver and gold paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some minor undulation to the sheet throughout; two very thin and faint vertical creases towards the right of the bottom edge, which are probably inherent to the artist's method; an extremely thin and short tear to the centre of the left edge, one to the upper left edge, and one across the tip of the top left corner.
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"Polke's photography reveals the intersections of his life and art and informs all of his art with specific glimpses into the life of this very private artist" Paul Schimmel, Op. Cit., p.59

 

 

Sigmar Polke's images of the opium dens of Quetta, Pakistan, are among his most important works of the decade, described by Paul Schimmel as "some of the most visually exquisite and most carefully crafted photographs in his entire oeuvre" (Paul Schimmel, 'Polkography' in Exhibition Catalogue, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, 1995, p. 59). These two rare examples, both of which were included in the first major survey of Poke's photographic oeuvre, are among the best of their kind. Depicting two distinct rituals of male society in Pakistan, these images of a tea ceremony and waterpipe ceremony show the full gamut of Polke's fully evolved photographic practise which revolutionised the medium's painterly capacity.

 

Polke started using photography at the tail end of the 1960s. At the time, he was garnering great acclaim for his paintings which often translated photographic images purloined from the print media through his idiosyncratic painterly abstraction which emphasised the raster dot employed by the commercial printing press. While his American colleagues like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein sought to emphasise the machine processes of mass printing, Polke's eye always sought the imperfections and serendipity abstractions created by the raster pattern of dots which disrupted the coherence of the printed image, becoming as enamoured with the dots as with the subject that they collectively sought to represent.

 

The same aesthetic ideal of abstract incoherence was the key driver for his fascination with the medium of photography that fully occupied him throughout the 1970s. While his first photographic images, made in 1968, respected the standard documentary purpose of photography, his experiments within the genre in the 1970s saw him manipulate his own negatives and prints in the same way that he had manipulated the raster pattern in his paintings. In this new chapter of his career, painting and drawing took a backseat. For Polke, the various technical stages involved in developing and processing the traditional photographic image each became an arena for experimentation which, like the raster printing pattern, he sought to exploit to his creative end. In other words, having understood the limitations of faithful photography, Polke became fascinated by the miraculous effects he could achieve by departing from the rules. As Brice Curiger explains, "Polke utilizes a wide range of possibilities: manipulating the negative, multiple exposure, projection onto photosensitive material (usually paper), solarization, interim exposure, sandwiching negatives. He also tampers with the solutions by prolonging or decreasing the time allotted for each chemical process, adding other substances, partially fixing; mounting things onto the print surface and other experimental variations. Other methods Polke uses include collages, painting over, 'drawing' with photosensitive emulsion, exposure by means of moving light sources on the unexposed material; working with intended and accidental blurring; distension, screens, manual damage, smudging. These steps are not performed according to any strict rules, but are the result of spontaneous impulses or, as the case may be, of exact calculations, and are consistently motivated by a keen interest in the discovery and the search for new levels of meaning" (Brice Curiger, 'Cross-Fire Photography' in Exhibition Catalogue, Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Sigmar Polke, 1990, p. 46).

 

Polke's newfound interest in photochemical exploration in the darkroom went hand in hand with his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs and his passion for exotic experiences and travel. His trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1974 witnessed a highpoint of this adventure. At the time, long before the atrocities of the Twenty-first Century and before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Kabul was a destination firmly on the caravan route for India-bound hippies. Alighiero Boetti, Francesco Clemente and Philip Taaffe and Bruce Chatwin all sought creative inspiration in Kabul in the 1970s, Boetti even opened a hotel there.

 

Polke found that taking drugs at this time proved helpful for his work and the resulting sense of heightened visual and spiritual awareness he experienced is powerfully conveyed in the Quetta series, in which we see manifest Polke's attempt to find equivalence between printing techniques and the perceptual and psychological effects of opium.  In these works, as he had done previously with his rasterbild paintings, Polke formed a working method that linked the subjects that interested him and the means by which they were realised. As Paul Schimmel explains in the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition of these two works in 1995, "He shot these images of opium dens in 1974 but it was not until three or four years later that he laboriously hand coloured the exquisite details of their imperfections, including hand prints and scratches, to convey the mind-expanding experiences to be found there. His alterations and manipulations so beautifully interfere with the negatives that the viewer becomes nearly as entranced and seduced by the hallucinogenic properties of the opium as were both the photographer and his subjects. In these works Polke, with an unusual sense of craftsmanly detail, painted the architectural and figurative elements in tones of orange, red, blue, green, purple and turquoise. However, the rich otherworldly quality of these colours only forms a backdrop to their more dramatic aspects. Every scratch, fingerprint, and visual imperfection is carefully in-painted with silver and gold leaf, beginning with what was already in the negative (as evidenced by looking at a set of the un-retouched black and white photographs). Polke elaborated these imperfections to such a degree that they form a scrim of scratches, glitches and dots between the viewer and the subject. In so doing, he created the visual equivalent of the "white noise" – the hum of murmuring voices – that both disrupts and ultimately informs the ritualised proceedings of the consumption of opium. Going a step further than the photographs of the Paris series, which were printed while under the influence [of LSD], these images materialise a sense of the experience produced by consuming the drug". (Paul Schimmel, Op. Cit., p. 72)