Sigmar Polke

Michael Werner, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in March 2007

This work is in excellent condition overall. There is slight undulation to the sheet, consistent with the artist's use of medium. The sheet is hinged verso intermittently along the edges. Framed under Plexiglas.
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Evident in the masterpieces executed throughout the decades of the artist's remarkable career, Sigmar Polke scrutinizes the subject of idealized beauty through tackling our cognitive sense of visual perception. In the present work from 2006, majestic layers of depthless black provide the backdrop arena to a panoply of radiant white spots and strokes, the play of which adjust through shifting relationships of light and perspective. Polke masterfully highlights the fragility of perception and the inherent constraints of assigning fixed meaning. He not only challenges the viewer to define exactly what they are seeing but also questions the very authority of the image and its role as a tool of communication by critiquing issues of perception. Indeed, this continual flux has been aptly described by John Caldwell, "What Polke has done is to produce paintings that seem to look back at us by changing as we look at them, and thus allow them to have the very aura of a work of art.” (John Caldwell, in Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sigmar Polke, 1990, p. 13).  

As seen within the present work, in the 1990s through his later years of production, Polke’s inquires turned to a more sustained exploration into alchemy: the reactive possibilities of diverse materials and mastery of color. The iridescent qualities of dispersion beautifully rendered in Untitled achieve a magical tranquility on the surface of the work as the elegant white particles seemingly sweep across the paper in one grand lyrical gesture, and the tremendous coalescence of mark-making and delicate mastery of materials alchemically forges a sense of serene chaos. Here, the viewer is confronted not only by the overwhelming power of the sophisticated composition, but by the painting’s impressive dominance of scale. The monumental size of the paper sheet bestows a powerful presence to equal Polke's most successful paintings. 

Embodying the artist’s post-war, modernist view of the world as an unpredictable place full of intrigue permeated with irony, Polke probed the role of image-maker, dancing around abstraction, conceptual and perceptual art. He obsessively manipulated and  reshaped his approach to visual culture through deconstructing the illusions and paradoxes of painting and contemporary media. While often rooted in ancient mythology, philosophy and chemistry, Polke’s experimental investigations retain a freshness and originality, never capable of categorization.