Sigmar Polke

Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1998

Valencia, IVAM Centre del Carme, Sigmar Polke, October 1994 - January 1995, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is an intermittent diagonal line in the lower half of the painted area on the left of the composition. There are no signs of inpainting or restoration under Ultraviolet light inspection. Framed.
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Presenting a vaguely discernible image hovering on the edge of readability, amidst a dancing sea of black and white raster-dots and a carpet-like fabric beneath, Rosa Tischdecke by Sigmar Polke is a dynamic and vibrant work powerfully evoking multiple senses of reality. Enigma, uncertainty, a sense of flux, simultaneity and values constantly shifting and reforming themselves are the central features of Polke's works. Making use of the artist’s trademark Rasterbild technique, the work is a deliberately ambiguous fusion of abstract, figurative, and modern mechanical means of illustration that appears to constantly challenge the viewer perceptually and intellectually.

Among the artist’s earliest creations, Polke's Rasterbilder (raster-dot-pictures) form one of the cornerstones of his incredibly varied and eclectic art. Polke's original fascination with the raster-dot as a painterly means of representation derived from his universal interest in the devices and codes by which knowledge and pictorial information  is structured and imparted. His first Rasterbilder painted in the 1960s were works that exploited the overt artifice of the raster-dot technique of printing as a way of subverting and questioning the apparent truth, validity and purpose of the media-based images that they purported to offer. Polke subsequently began to  deliberately manipulate and extend the raster technique. He magnified the dots and distorted them to create matrix-like patterns that created a dynamic, living, though also abstract, sense of surface. When magnified, the dots took on a unique and utonomous character all of their own. Becoming mischievous 'Polke-dots' as he liked to call them, they not only intentionally upset the cohesiveness and discernibility of the original image, but they also became painterly suggestions of another alternate, abstract reality of their own making.

Rosa Tischdecke fuses all these elements within the simple and conventional format of a single canvas and further develops Polke's confounding anti-style approach to the craft of picture making. This sense of multiple realities suggested by the vague and varied painted surface is also compounded by the imagery of the painting. The black and white salamander-like figures, whose possible respective and individual eyeballs appear toward the bottom of the canvas, appear to move on the surface. The multiple patterns of the rug or scarf-like fabric below these figures conflates the unclear imagery. The way these forms assert themselves both invokes and reflects a view of the world as a volatile reality that manifests itself simultaneously in many different ways and can be seen and experienced through multiple layers of consciousness.