Sigmar Polke

Acquired directly from the artist in 1994

Musée de Grenoble, Sigmar Polke, November 2013 - February 2014, p. 116, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition overall. Under ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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"I like the way that the dots in a magnified picture swim and move about. The way that motifs change from recognizable to unrecognizable, the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open...Lots of dots vibrating, resonating, blurring, re-emerging, thoughts of radio signals, radio pictures and television come to mind." Sigmar Polke

The ordered raster dots so prevalent in many of Sigmar Polke’s most prized early works, such as Familie 2 and Freundinnen, 1965-1966 are undone and liberated from representation in Untitled. The undermining of pictorial order epitomizes Polke’s wild disregard for the conventions of painting. In this work Polke attacks his own revolutionary contributions to figurative painting: the Rasterbilder of the 60s. From an early stage in his career, Polke was thinking about pushing this pictorial language further beyond representation. The dots in the work in question have been vibrated and blurred to re-emerge out of the white splat of dispersion as a new, abstract, and painterly collection of dots. In his liberation of the Raster dots, Polke has created a dynamic, almost organic painting whose lack of overall pictorial cohesion allows for a variety of ways for interpretation and appreciation. This alchemical activity plays out over a layer of electric printed fabric. The white paint used by Polke fluctuates in radiance depending on the luminosity of its surroundings; this shifting quality is emphatically underscored by the bright but matte patterned backdrop of Polke’s Untitled.

The present work represents a crowning achievement in Polke’s enduring inquiry in the alchemical nature of painting. The iridescent dots and accompanying slop of paint streak across the found printed fabric in an expressly gestural manner and yet there is an obvious mastery of mark-making which creates a sense of serenity within the chaos and freedom of the work. The plethora of pictorial languages and artistic modes of art making used, from the raster dots to the readymade and paint drop, embody the artist’s view of the world as an unfathomable place full of uncontrollable intrigue. Polke investigates the role of the artist as image-maker, playing with abstraction (the pool of paint), conceptual (readymade fabric) and perceptual art (the iridescence of the paint and the pattern of the fabric). Polke’s experiments retain a freshness and originality, defiantly flouting all attempts at categorization.