Fusing manufactured imagery with a geometric and minimalist painterly form, Sigmar Polke’s Weißer obelisk (White obelisk) challenges traditional pictorial representation and sets the tone for the artist’s highly experimental and hybridized approach to image-making – a methodology that would both confound critics and win him crucial veneration as a heavyweight of the postmodern era. Executed in 1968, this work belongs to a series in which industrially produced fabrics were stretched in place of canvas for use as painterly grounds. Commercially produced for use in children’s costumes, the over-painted printed cloth which forms the present work here serves to both underline West Germany’s burgeoning consumer culture and the concurrent climate of radical artistic ingenuity in the decades following World War II. Tate curator Alex Farquharson explains: "Techniques such as these represented a radical affront to the unity of painting as understood by the Modernist tradition. Polke's works were everything painting wasn't supposed to be: vulgar, mocking, parodic, decorative, heterotopic, discontinuous, self-reflexive and self-critical... Polke was the consummate and emblematic Postmodern painter" (A. Farquharson, 'Sigmar Polke', Frieze Magazine, Issue 81, March 2004, online). Exhibited widely at prestigious institutions, Weißer obelisk (White obelisk) negotiates the aesthetics of Polke's contemporary moment while invoking an enduring meditation on the power of momento mori symbolism within art history.

Iconic motifs pervade the surface of Weißer obelisk (White obelisk) in monochromatic hues: a large pyramid is juxtaposed against a printed ground of skulls, bones and all-seeing eyes. These eschatological symbols impart age-old esoteric connotations and evoke religious cults or mystic rituals. Many of Polke’s later works expand upon this very same iconography. Untitled (2003), held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is one such example. The work is based on an advert for an 1802 phantasmogoria act in London; such performances were popular in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries in Europe and presented harrowing allusions to magic, demons, apparitions and the afterlife. Like Weißer obelisk, the work at SFMoMA prominently features a skull, as well as other key nature morte motifs, including a book, a pitcher and two lit candles. By employing such iconography in his work, Polke may be commenting upon the Enlightenment-era shift away from mystical beliefs towards science-driven knowledge. Yet the imagery of Weißer obelisk also suggests the art historical vanitas tradition – works that show the transience of life and the certainty of death. Herein, Polke confirms this genre’s unassailable relevance to twentieth and twenty-first century post-war and contemporary art.

The ominous, hollow-eyed skull is perhaps the most striking motif in the present work and is one of the most recognisable within the vanitas tradition. As radical, preeminent images of death, mortality, and human impermanence, Polke’s skulls recall seventeenth-century masterpieces such as Pieter Claesz’ Still life with as skull and a writing quill (1628) or Vanitas still life (1625) held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frans Hals Museum respectively. Paul Cezanne’s post-Impressionist Three skulls (c. 1900) and Pablo Picasso’s cubist composition Crane, sea urchins and lamp on a table, still life (1946) are further prescient examples that employ emblems symbolising the fleeting, the finite, and the temporary. It is worth noting, however, that the only hand-painted element in Weißer obelisk is the geometric pyramid at the centre of the composition. Another occult symbol, the pyramid is in many ways the antithesis to the skull. While the skull infers death, Egyptians saw the pyramid as a symbol for the process of providing new life to the dead; its shape a visual expression of the body ascending from the earth towards the sky. In contrast to the skull, which perhaps alludes to the artist’s own fear of death and mortality, the pyramid is a more hopeful symbol of life and regeneration.

In lieu of traditional canvas, Polke’s use of mass-manufactured printed fabric raises questions about the boundary between high and low, fine and commercial art. Yet, as previously noted, its use, particularly throughout the 1960s, is also suggestive of Germany’s bourgeoning post-war consumer culture. In 1963, Polke coined the term Kapitalischer Realismus or ‘Capitalist Realism’ with his contemporaries Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner and Konrad Lueg. This movement functioned as a direct response to the tense political environment of their collective childhood and served as an ironic nod to the state-sponsored style of ‘Socialist Realism’ of the German Democratic Republic. Moreover, the movement acknowledged the aesthetics of consumer culture which prevailed in the work of American Pop art luminaries Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg. Indeed, Polke’s transformation of mass-produced fabric into a not-so-blank canvas is striking, while his depicted symbolism relays a nuanced investigation into the history of art. Executed when Polke was only 27 years old, Weißer obelisk is an iconographic work in reverence to the transience and impermanence of human life, and in turn an expression of the artist’s enduring meditations on the power of symbolism in the contemporary moment.