Sigmar Polke

Private Collection, Vienna (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the iridescent quality of the blue and white pigment apparent in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

 "Polke's paintings are much more than marooned and shipwrecked images, art historical salvage and technicalpyrotechnics. His art may have begun as a European response to American pop art, but it went on to be much more. He both dismantled painting and reconfigured our idea of what it could be. He respected history and played devil with it." Adriane Searle, The Guardian, June 16, 2010

Sigmar Polke's prolific artistic career not only represents one of the late twentieth century's most acute critical commentaries on the condition of Western culture, but is simultaneously widely understood to be one of the most innovative and influential additions to the history of contemporary art. Equally esoteric and eccentric, Polke's visionary artistic experimentation ranges broadly in focus from penetrating observations on the political, economic and ideological contradictions rife in post-war Europe, to the satirization of popular culture, media and high art. The variety of Polke's artistic execution both mirrors and brilliantly exposes the neurotic quest for meaning inherent to the post-modern condition that disallowed fixed points of philosophical and spiritual reference.

Constant throughout the variations in Polke's artistic methodology is a dedicated interest in the formal and theoretical elements that differentiate abstraction from figuration. While initially this fascination was made manifest in the artist abstracting figurative cultural images, in the late 1980s and early 1990s Polke reversed his approach, suggesting the figurative in the abstract through a sustained inquiry into alchemy, the reactive possibilities of diverse materials and the mastery of colour to creates a mirage on the surfaces on his canvases. The present lot is a brilliant example of Polke's thrilling dance on the edge of abstraction and figuration, using both concepts to open a dialogue with the viewer regarding the impact of illusion in the wake of art historical expectation. In the present work the artist uses absolute abstraction to create the illusion of a figurative landscape, the spectacular iridescent image against the weighty darkness sublimely suggestive of an eruptive natural force and an almost apocalyptic scene. The artist's oblique and subtly subconscious reference to the figurative through the abstract undermines his contemporary's blind reverence for artistic genre and style and turns the responsibility over to the viewer to tease apart the visual suggestions played across the canvas.