Sigmar Polke

Michael Werner Gallery, New York
Private Collection, United States
Sotheby's, New York, 15 May 2014, Lot 253
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the yellow is slightly brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to a backing sheet. There are artist's pinholes in the upper corners. The sheet undulates slightly. Very close inspection reveals some minor and unobtrusive handling creases in places and a few tiny tears to the edges. There is some light paper skinning to the upper left corner, and the upper right corner is irregularly torn, which appears to be original.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Demonstrating the artist’s vivid imagination, sardonic wit, and eclectic creative process that characterises his drawings, watercolours, and gouaches of the 1960s and early 1970s, Untitled is in every way an exceptional example of Sigmar Polke’s highly accomplished practice. His earliest expressive idiom was crude and humorous, its images outrageous, and its content seemingly trivial, but embedded in these works were subversive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, German post-war politics, and classic artistic conventions. In the present work, the artist blends the two pictorial paradigms of figurative and abstract art by using an overtly sexualised female body as a starting point, and then superimposing it on a background composed of bright and expressively painted colours within which further reverberations of the human form are revealed. Untitled is rich in the artist’s disjunctive wit and revels in the wild, surreal power of metaphor and crosscommunication, echoing the hallucinatory world of multiple perspectives as well as the graphic elegance of Francis Picabia’s Transparency paintings of the 1920s. In his playful destruction of traditional pictorial expectations and juggling of simultaneous visions, Polke shook the very foundations of art to seek a new, pluralist truth.

Polke’s interest in this multitude of perspectives echoes the artist’s philosophical interests, and as such reflects more fundamental concerns that extend beyond the realm of art. The ‘Uncertainty Principle’ that physicist Werner Heisenberg first established in the 1920s asserts that the more precisely the position of an entity is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known. Among the wider repercussions of this principle is the realisation that reality, as we perceive or understand it, is neither a fixed nor stable phenomenon, but one that reveals itself only in a series of shifting contexts. Polke, who came to appreciate Heisenberg’s principle through his exploratory use of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and 1970s, was not only one of the first artists to recognise this but also to built a visual language based upon simultaneous and multiple views of reality collided within the fixed environment of the picture plane. Polke even insisted that his own apparently intuitive, light-hearted and deliberately anti-rational aesthetic was also a ‘progressive scientific’ method for exploring reality. It was a ‘scientific’ method, he wryly noted, which can “no longer concern itself with boorish causalities or self-satisfied reasons but must focus instead upon relationships, since without relationships, even causality itself might just as well pack up and leave, and every reason would be without consequence” (Sigmar Polke cited in: Exh. Cat., Berlin, Sigmar Polke -The Three Lies of Painting, 1997, pp. 289-290).

Summarising the artist’s radical and experimental approach to art-making in a powerful visual image, Untitled demonstrates his desire to amalgamate modes of abstraction and figuration into heavily layered images, and perfectly captures the essence of Sigmar Polke’s innovative and influential practice.