Sigmar Polke

Doris and Charles Saatchi, London
Joseph E. and Arlene McHugh, Chicago and Vancouver
Private Collection

Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Sigmar Polke, September - October 1984, p. 94, illustrated in color
London, The Saatchi Gallery, Golub, Guston, Polke, 1988, p. 163, illustrated in color in installation
San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; New York, The Brooklyn Museum, Sigmar Polke, November 1991 - January 1992, cat. no. 25, p. 68, pl. 23, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Tübingen, Kunsthalle Tübingen (and traveling), Sigmar Polke; Bilder, Tücher, Objekte: Werkauswahl 1962-1971, 1976, no. 156, p. 25, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art (and traveling), Sigmar Polke: Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, 1995, p. 65, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Bonn, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (and traveling), Sigmar Polke. Die drei Lügen der Malerei, 1997-98, p. 124, illustrated in color
Edward Booth-Clibborn, ed., The History of the Saatchi Gallery, London, 2011, n.p., illustrated

This painting is in very good condition. Close inspection under raking light reveals a number of isolated networks of extremely thin hairline cracks in places to the surface, particularly in the upper left quadrant and the top black corners, which are consistent with the artist's choice of media and a work of this date. The canvas has been relined, which has stabilized the surface. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a small number of extremely minor retouchings to the black corners. The canvas is framed in a blonde wood strip frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Having spent the 1960s defining the parameters of an inimitable brand of Pop Art in West Germany, in the following decade Sigmar Polke turned his attention increasingly towards an ever proliferating diaspora of artistic media. Appearing almost like a still from a reel of film, Polke's major work Portrait of David Lamelas (Obelisk) of 1971 engages the vocabulary of figurative content yet remains highly elusive and determinedly outside of categorization. The brilliant color and confident imagery suggest an immediately recognizable subject within an entirely logical context. However, ultimately this painting mediates a critical path between abstraction and figuration, while also remaining rooted in the pop vernacular of Polke's earlier output. Here this mysterious monolith is framed in a cosmic field of red light and splattered with a connect-the-dots portrait of David Lamelas smoking a cigarette, both in white on the left and mirrored in black on the right, creating a symmetrical effect reminiscent of a Rorschach test. An Argentine sculptor, conceptual artist, photographer and experimental filmmaker, David Lamelas was a pioneer of Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Central concerns of his practice include the temporality of creativity, themes of alternative communication and the foundational principles of visual cognition. Polke's portrait of him is similarly multifaceted within a brilliant red field framed by curved black corners that imply the frame of a camera, mirror or indeed the distinctive frame of an early television set.

Sigmar Polke's mercurial oeuvre conjures with and seeks to deconstruct the illusions and paradoxes of painting. Viewed in the context of Polke's inimitable brand of Pop Art and the Kapitalistischer Realismus, this painting questions the very mechanics of the art of painting and is in the highest tier of this brilliant innovator's work. By making transparent the construction of his image, Polke appears not only to acknowledge the historical relevance and parameters of painterly convention, but also sets out to challenge and extend them. Typical of the international wider Pop Art movement to which, by the time of this painting, he was a central protagonist, Portrait of David Lamelas (Obelisk) embodies the rebellious attitude to the act and art of painting and image representation as expounded by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. Emphasizing formal features of design, pattern and color, Polke, like his Pop Art peers, here questions the status of the finished object and the authorial hand of the artist. The important use of spray paint in the present work became a critical medium for his art, and in a brilliantly concise departure from precedent, is utterly devoid of the painterly artistic gesture that had defined prevailing trends in Art History.

Born in Oels, Silesia, then in East Germany and now in Poland, Polke moved to West Germany in 1953, where he was to win the Young German Art Prize and have his first solo shows in Berlin and Dusseldorf immediately prior to this work in 1966. However, his student career, spanning 1961 to 1967 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, was paramount in shaping his immensely dynamic approach to art. He studied under Karl Otto Götz and Gerhard Höhme, and the pedagogical presence of Joseph Beuys on the faculty was hugely significant. Beuys considered art as the potential facilitator of social and political change, and his actions and performances must have greatly expanded Polke's understanding of what art could achieve. Indeed, even in 1963 and with his friends Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, Polke initiated the quasi movement Kapitalistischer Realismus that, in its title alone, was a pithy riposte to the state-sponsored 'Socialist Realism' of the GDR. Their first exhibition was entitled Life with Pop - A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism: clearly these young men saw art as a means to effect political and social ends. Moreover, their open letter of 1963 stated that: "Pop Art recognizes the modern mass media as a genuine cultural phenomenon and turns their attributes, formulations and content, through artifice, into art. It thus fundamentally changes the face of modern painting and inaugurates an aesthetic revolution. Pop Art has rendered conventional painting - with all its sterility, its isolation, its artificiality, its taboos and its rules - entirely obsolete, and has rapidly achieved international currency and recognition by creating a new view of the world." (Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, and Sigmar Polke, "Letter to a newsreel company," April 29, 1963, in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 16).