Sigmar Polke

Enzo Cannaviello, Milan
Private Collection (acquired from the above circa 1984)
Christie's, Amsterdam, 15 May 2012, Lot 57
Acquired 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. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is hinged verso to the mount in the upper two corners and undulates. Visible only when inspected out of the frame, are some small tape strips attached to the lower edge, not affecting the main image.
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Brimming with a vibrant and almost palpable energy, Untitled, from 1983 is a real triumph of Sigmar Polke’s work from the early 1980s. Having spent much of his remarkable artistic career redefining the parameters of what art can achieve, the artist created a body of works that is highly experimental and uncompromisingly inventive. After showing at Documenta just the year before in 1982, Untitled was conceived at a time of artistic appreciation and critical international consideration. The artist had given up painting for almost a decade in the 1970s to focus his creative powers on other media such as film and photography, but after this intermezzo, Polke returned to painting, filling his works with a new vitality and pictorial dynamism, akin to the radical brilliance of his paintings of the 1960s.

Unorthodox materials have always played an important role in Polke’s oeuvre. Printed fabrics, both for their material and pictorial qualities, meteor dust and even arsenic were used to create new masterpieces, but it was only after his break from painting in the 70s that he fully embraced a new approach to the application of materials and established an entirely new mode of pictorial possibilities. Chance became a key element in the composition of new works. With a decidedly post-modern approach, Polke went beyond the work of contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter and created mesmerizing patterns with both materials and gravity as compositional tools. In many works, the present one included, opalescent washes of color adorn the paper in an almost ecclesiastic fashion. An emphasis on qualities of light and transparency permeate the work, informed no doubt by an apprenticeship Polke undertook in a stained glass factory in Düsseldorf.

Grounded by a central figure that is almost lost in abstraction, Untitled shows layers of color and a selection of distinctly familiar imagery, arranged in a sophisticated and complex composition. Painterly elements both spar and complement each other in a stunning combination of figuration and abstraction. The most instantly recognizable figurative element is a skeleton, caught in profile and clad in a dark transparent cloth or coat. Having used skulls in several of his earlier works, Polke combines the classical Vanitas symbol with a witty hint on previous experiments with dangerous substances and drugs. The figure appears to be holding a sickle reminiscent of the grim reaper and the immediacy and speed with which Polke applied the paint, gives the work a dynamic and powerful energy. Brilliant red and dark black brushstrokes dominate the composition, painfully reminiscent of Polke’s past, both under the Nazi regime and in a divided Germany in which the East was firmly in communist hands. Polke knew the manipulative power of media and propaganda extremely well and seems to have used this knowledge to his advantage.

In Untitled, the artist appears to not only acknowledge the historical relevance and parameters of painterly convention, but also to set out to challenge and extend them. It is the key to the success of this painting, instilling its refinement of a classical memento mori iconography, whilst at the same time imbuing it with a symphony of color that radiates from the paper. In Untitled, Polke successfully bends the rules traditionally associated with painting. Indeed, as Bernard Marcadé writes, “While Gerhard Richter radically separated his ‘figurative’ paintings from his ‘abstract’ paintings, Polke always took great care not to favor one side over the other and to let these two pictorial paradigms interpenetrate and contaminate each other.” (Bernard Marcadé in Exh. Cat., Musée de Grenoble, Sigmar Polke, November 2013 - February 2014, p. 17). Polke challenged us to unravel the riddles he presented on canvas, yet did so in an enigmatic way that ultimately leaves interpretation a matter of personal subjectivity.