Sigmar Polke

Galerie Jürgen Becker, Hamburg (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1999

The huge scale and stripped down presentation of  'painting' in Panorama immediately announces a witty deconstruction of the sheer process of painting.  Executed in 1997, the year of the world climate conference which resulted in the Kyoto protocol to reduce  emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases in the world's atmosphere, the subtitle immediately hints at a play on words. Borrowed directly from a newspaper headline of the day, the idea of "Lucrative trade with air" can be read in many different ways. Whether it be a witty take on the commercial nature of the contemporary art world, trading money for apparently effortless gestures, or a witty metaphor for Polke's use of a transparent resin 'canvas' which allows one to see the structure and the air behind, it is clear that a clever conceptual game has been initiated. As an early member of the international Pop art movement and a wisely mocking political observer, Sigmar Polke adopted newspaper and consumer imagery for artistic ends in much the same manner as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. His renowned Rasterbild paintings of this period adopted the machine technique of printing in much the same manner as Lichtenstein's Benday dot paintings of the same time. However his adaptation always carried a slightly more political and conceptual edge and  his role in the growth of the Conceptual Art movement with the likes of John Baldessari and Joseph Kosuth cannot be under-estimated. these theories of the late 1960s are here carried through into the 1990s and a new highly advanced medium with which to elaborate them.

Polke has never been conventional in his choice of medium. In the 1990s Polke increasingly incorporated transparent polyester fabric in his pictures, to which he applies synthetic resin lacquer in many layers. The wooden stretchers are rendered visible and enter the material structure of the image, much like a Minimalist painting, reinforcing lines or divisions in the image itself. Panorama - Lukrativer Handel mit der Luft is one of the grandest example of this series, in which light is activated as an ambient energy illuminating the totality of the picture. Observing these works, the viewer notices that the colouration of the picture changes according to the angle from which it is viewed, its surface ever elusive. The picture is never finished. It transforms itself like a living unity before the eyes of the viewer.