SIGMAR POLKE | Different from Case to Case

Michael Werner Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2000

New York and Cologne, Michael Werner Gallery, Sigmar Polke: Druckfehler, 1996-98, October 1998 - March 1999, n.p., no. 5, illustrated in colour Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art; and London, Tate Modern, Sigmar Polke. History of Everything: Recent Paintings and Drawings, 1998-2003, November 2002 - January 2004, p. 117 (installation view) and p. 125, illustrated in colour

New York, Shin Gallery, Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Nee, Nee, Nee, April - May 2015

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the illustration fails to convey the translucency of work's surface and the double sided nature of the work. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are shiny spots of resin in places to the edges of the wooden support, which are inherent to the artist's working process. There are some threads protruding from the vertical side edges where the two wooden stretchers are sandwiched together; these are not visible when framed and are also in-keeping with the artist's working process. Unobtrusive small drip marks are uniformly evident across the work's shiny resin surface. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in 1998, Different from Case to Case belongs to Sigmar Polke’s Druckfehler (Printing Errors) series; a pivotal body of work that appropriates the artist’s own idiosyncratic pattern from his seminal Rasterbilder of the 1960s. Inspired by printing errors found in mass media imagery, Polke became fascinated with the elegance of human error and the relationship between the mechanical mistake and the original image. Celebrating the halftone dot pattern – the tonal register that has enabled images to be reproduced in newspapers, photographs, and consumer packaging since the late Nineteenth Century – Polke embarked on a more intensely concentrated investigation into the limits of painting and representation, the operations of visual cognition as well as the act of image making through the mechanics of self-expression. The newspaper has provided Polke with both subject matter and technique; that is, images made with the ‘dot’ process of newspaper illustration and commercial printing. As such, Polke’s art has been compared to that of Roy Lichtenstein, but whereas Lichtenstein revelled in the surface beauty of an image, its airtight union of form, colour, and design, Polke literally and metaphorically dissects and dissolves images. Indeed, Polke was deeply aware of the powerful influence of mass media and its monopoly on forming opinions. The artist began in the 1960s as a member of the group of German ‘Capitalist Realists’ opposed both to East German Socialist Realism and to American Pop’s glossy celebration of modern materials. In a conflation of the visible and the invisible, specific image and blurred picture, recognition and distortion, the present work strongly reverberates with Polke’s career-long investigation into the limits of our pervasive visual culture.

In Different from Case to Case, Polke recruited a photocopier to enlarge and distort tiny specks of ink found on printed matter. Combining green iridescent cloth with a gold fabric mesh buried within the elaborate surface, Polke created yet another filter through which the image must be read. Subsequently Polke painted the image onto a polyester surface with the aid of a projector, coating the surface in layers of viscous resin. The result is a rectangular frame in which gelatinous forms mutate and pulsate. As though osmosis has taken hold, the petri dish specimen melts and congeals, oozing towards the wooden border within which it is contained. Such biomorphic forms recall the modernist abstractions of Joan Miro or Paul Klee, but unlike his predecessors, Polke took on the mantle of transcendent abstraction as informed by a culture of mass-media. Offering a complex multitude of conceptual and material strata, coalescence of form and colour collide to produce a curious alchemical concoction.

Forging a mesmeric dichotomy of exposure and occlusion, Polke invokes a myriad of visual perspectives. Disrupting the stability of representation, the artist threatens the very make-up of images, heralding the concept of failure and dissolution as a seductive visual paradigm to interrogate the perception of visual beauty. In the present work, Polke teasingly stretches the possibilities of oil on canvas to suggest another medium entirely, combining elements of high and low culture with impressive dexterity. The result is a work of multifaceted intricacy and stunning complexity, in which an apparently ordinary image has been raised to the level of sublime invention through Polke’s astounding imagination and creative prowess.



We are most grateful to Mr. Michael Trier, Artistic Director from the Estate of Sigmar Polke, for the information he has kindly provided.