Sigmar Polke

Private Collection, Austria (acquired from the artist)

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the image fails to convey the intensity of the neon yellow apparent in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is some slight undulation to the sheet. Very close inspection reveals some unobtrusive and short framing and handling creases in places to the extreme edges and a diagonal crease to the bottom right corner.
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As an amorphous network of curvilinear contours undulates through its lustrous malachite surface, Sigmar Polke’s spectacular Untitled from 2008 incandescently glows with a thrilling radioactive magnetism. Reverberating with shimmering metallic hues, golden yellows, and acidic greens, Untitled imparts glorious light effects that verge on the ecclesiastic. Shadowy emerald matrixes of the artist’s signature raster-dots emerge from the background of the painting, evoking in their stratification of luminescent colour the very genesis of Polke’s practice from the early 1960s. The result is a mesmerising field in which painterly elements both spar against and complement each other while the chromatic value of the artist’s varied media inject the piece with an undisputed brilliance.  As pearlescent torrents of yellow and green burst from the center of the painting and splinter across the surface, they are met by gleaming pools of silver and white. Majestic layers of depthless colour create a cinematic arena of form that constantly adjusts through shifting relationships of light and perspective. Indeed, this continual flux coursing through Untitled has been aptly described by John Caldwell: "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” (John Caldwell in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sigmar Polke, 1990, p. 13). In the exhilarating present work, we are made privy to an assortment of Polke’s most gestural and pictorially compelling painterly tendencies, compressing decades of his ceaselessly inventive career into a singular image.

Forfeiting legibility in favour of pure formal opacity, Polke subverts the very authority of pictures and displaces their communicative potential with a multi-layered ambiguity that here poses important questions about the nature of image-making, of perception, and of reality. The juxtaposition between the curved lines nearing precision and the arcs of iridescent colours from which they emerge results in a striking yet harmonious visual dichotomy, as the viewer perceives glimpses of detail amidst swathes of complex tonal hues.  Untitled is archetypal of Polke’s best invention whereby an emphasis on qualities of light and transparency permeate his work, informed no doubt by an apprenticeship he undertook in a stained glass factory in Dusseldorf. Carefully guarded guild secrets since the Fifteenth Century, the techniques of German glass painting are known nevertheless to involve complex layers of metallic substances including silver nitrate, whose properties are evoked by the metallic alchemical surface of Untitled. Moreover, the impressive and monumental size of the paper sheet instills a strength and presence to Untitled, which is equally impactful as that of Polke's most successful paintings. The commissioner of the West German Pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale, Dierk Stemmler, described the progress of the artist’s contemporaneous work in the following terms: “Sigmar Polke is a transformer, and at the same time an investigator who explores for himself, through innumerable obstinate enquiries and experiments with historical and contemporary materials, the chemico-physical properties and reactions of dyes, lacquers, minerals, metals, and their combinations and mutations under the influx of radiation, light, heat, radioactivity…Incompatibilities crash into one another in enlarged extraneous-familiar spaces, functioning as intermediaries in visual dialogues with the intensity of original representations” (Dierk Stemmler in General Catalogue: XLII Esposizione internazionale d'arte la biennale di Venezia, Venice, 1986, p. 276). Standing before Untitled, we bear witness to an ethereal, ectoplasmic display of interlocking shapes that evolve before our eyes, embodying Polke’s career-long persistence to defy categorisation by any means.