Sigmar Polke

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Saatchi Collection, London
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1990

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Sigmar Polke, 1985
London, Saatchi Collection, Leon Golub, Sigmar Polke, Philip Guston, Joel Shapiro, 1988
Frankfurt, Museum für Moderne Kunst, on temporary loan, 1994 - 96
Baden-Baden, Museum Frieder Burda, Bilderwechsel, 2005
Baden-Baden, Museum Frieder Burda; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig; Dresden, Galerie Neue Meister in der Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Polke. Eine Retrospektive. Die Sammlungen Frieder Burda, Josef Froehlich, Reiner Speck, 2007 -08, p. 56, no. 31, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, Baden-Baden, Kunsthalle, Sammlung Frieder Burda, 1996, p. 149, no. 57, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Ostfildern-Ruit, Sammlung Frieder Burda, 2004, p. 216, no. 136, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly brighter and glossier in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is minor undulation throughout. There is very minor rubbing to the top right corner and bottom left corner and along the top edge towards the right. There is a very faint diagonal crease mark to the centre left of the composition, which appears to be inherent to the artist's working process.
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Combining the trademark elements of 'raster dot' painting and the resin medium, Wer hat noch nicht, wer will nochmal is a monumental work that showcases Sigmar Polke's renowned and prolific innovation. The reverberating matrix of repetitive binary pattern across the canvas provides the suggestion of imagery through a codified visual language. However, this schema, rooted in Polke's characteristic dots, has been reduced to the boundary of abstraction, so that literal imagery is not perceptible. Indeed, the ploys of perception are reflected from the outset in the work's enigmatic title Wer hat noch nicht, wer will nochmal ('Who hasn't been served, who wants more?'). With sustained viewing the image moves in and out of coherence; the constituents of the simplified schema never becoming exactly discernible. The title references a German idiom frequently heard in fairgrounds, roughly comparable to the invitation to 'roll up, roll up' to rides and attractions. With this reference in mind, the present work shows the scene through the viewing window of a motion-picture box, popular before the invention of film, whereby a sequence of pictures are turned on a wheel to imitate a moving image.

This canvas relates to the most celebrated body of work within Sigmar Polke's oeuvre, known as rasterbild ('raster painting'), where dots are magnified and painted in imitation of the lines and grids characteristic of the raster scanning and printing process. This radical technique was a reaction to both Eastern Socialist Realism and Western Pop Art, interrogating the contemporaneous phenomenon of mass-media photo-mechanical reproduction. The rasterbilder works not only critique issues of perception and reality in a media-obsessed world but also challenge global methods of communication as agents of social change. This work takes that precedent and extends the investigation right to the limits of abstraction. Pushing iconography to the boundary of resolution, this work is comparable to Polke's exceptional 1968 work The Three Astronauts Conquer the Moon, which was taken from a source image in The New York Times and dissolves the image to such a degree that cognition is only achieved at a significant distance from the work.

Having been born in the abysmally dark shadow of Nazism, Polke had lived on both sides of a divided Germany that was the crucible of the Cold War. Hence he knew extremely well the manipulative power of the media and the potential of propaganda. The predominant method of mass reproduction in the 1960s, the raster process transforms every facet of an image into a pixel value within a prefabricated hierarchy. Through the multiple layering of grids of spots, contours are reduced to stark silhouettes abysmally dark shadow of Nazism, Polke had lived on both sides of a divided Germany that while subtle variances in tone and hue are reduced to a matrix of black-and-white dots. The authority endemic to newspaper and published images was broadcast via these schematic grids and by breaking down the grids Polke subversively broke down the authority of the images. The present work disseminates the very essence of the image until it disintegrates, and as such is a profound commentary on the entire nature of visual cognition in our contemporary culture.