Sigmar Polke

Daros Collection, Zurich
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Zurich, Daros, Warhol, Polke, Richter, 2001, p. 103, illustrated in colour
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Sigmar Polke, Werke & Tage, 2005, p. 151, no. 22, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality tends slightly more towards a creamy hue. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in 1990, the present work embodies the entrancingly rendered abstraction and exploratory engagement with materials that epitomise Sigmar Polke's superlative opus. Following his critical Pop of the 1960s and focus upon photography in the 1970s, Polke synthesised in the 1980s earlier concerns toward the pursuit of exceptionally gorgeous non-figurative painting. He began incorporating photosensitive liquids as well as lacquers, minerals and diverse organic materials into his repertoire of media. Exhibiting the mature phase of Polke's mastery of such techniques, Untitled here employs silver bromide and silver oxide, two ingredients that form the foundation of modern negative and print developing. Conflating the media of photography, paint and drawing, Richter records the movements of his hand and brushstroke across the canvas, allowing the vicissitudes of light exposure to create slight modifications in the resulting tone of pigment. The product is an ethereal, ectoplasmic display of interlocking shapes suggesting deconstructed glyphs or fanciful riddles in line. Their internal activity holds the eye, enticing it to follow one path or another and to perceive meaning in their arrangement. John Caldwell has remarked: "what Polke has done is to produce paintings that seem to look back at us by changing as we look at them, and thus allow them to have the very aura of a work of art that Benjamin saw as inevitably vanishing in the modern world" (John Caldwell, 'Sigmar Polke' in: Exhibition Catalogue, Sigmar Polke, San Francisco 1990, p. 13). Given that Walter Benjamin theorised the photographic process as the prime agent of auratic loss, Polke would have delighted in ironically producing his mesmeric painterly designs from photography's constituent parts.

 

Alex Farquharson has described the era-defining nature of Polke's painterly explorations: "techniques such as these represented a radical affront to the unity of painting as understood by the Modernist tradition. Polke's works were everything painting wasn't supposed to be: vulgar, mocking, parodic, decorative, heterotopic, discontinuous, self-reflexive and self-critical... By the 1980s Polke was the consummate and emblematic Postmodern painter" (Alex Farquharson, 'Sigmar Polke', Frieze Magazine, Issue 81, March 2004). The grand and enigmatic presence of Untitled stems not from heavy daubs of oil paint, but from delicate layers of translucent and occasionally reflective material, cumulatively suggesting superimposed veils or an airy projection. An emphasis on qualities of light and transparency permeates Polke's work, informed no doubt by an apprenticeship he undertook in a stained glass factory in Düsseldorf. Carefully guarded guild secrets since the fifteenth century, the techniques of Bavarian glass painting are known nevertheless to involve complex layers of metallic and sheer substances including silver nitrate. Choosing in other instances to reduce the canvas itself unto glassy translucence, here Polke evinces watery markings that emerge from white ground as if forced to reveal their secrets.

 

The canvas of Untitled may thus be likened to a laboratory, within which experiments in altered states of perception and representation are explored via the unpredictable cross-contamination of chemicals and fibres. Areas of the canvas with small dots and subtly raised topographies represent patches of erosion, intended to elicit fresh textures within the work. Open about his interest in hallucinogenics, Polke strives to expand the sphere of the possible in art, sensuously approaching substances both exotic and mundane. The present work offers up a kind of delicacy – peach and yellow tones placed dreamily upon a clean white background – which appears refreshingly pristine in contrast to the dark earth, navy and gray tones appearing consistently in his abstracts of the 1980s. Here the "witches' brew of chemical mediums" concocts something new, testifying to Polke's endless capacity for morphing and transmuting his own oeuvre, growing intellectually and aesthetically more fecund with an alchemical prowess unique among contemporary artists.