Sigmar Polke

Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1986

This work is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The work is unframed.
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Blazing in a resplendent fury of Sigmar Polke’s most radical innovations in painting, Filzschleife from 1986 is a dazzling triumph of the artist’s effusive and unrelentingly inventive determination to redefine the parameters of what art can achieve. Executed during a time of extraordinary creative ferment in the 1980s, this period saw Polke receive serious international critical consideration: in 1982, the artist showed at Documenta; in 1986, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale; and in 1988, Polke participated in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Executed in the same monumental year when Polke represented Germany at the Venice Biennale, Filzschleife represents the output of an artist at the zenith of his creative powers. His presentation in the German Pavilion was the universal highlight for critics at the Biennale, a watershed moment in Polke’s career that inaugurated the understanding of the painter as an alchemist involved with explorations of scientific reactions of materials. The title of the 1986 exhibition was Athanor, the term for an alchemical kiln that directly signaled his fascination with alchemy as a system of understanding nature without recourse to positivistic science. Within the display, Polke included chunks of crystal, meteorite, and quicksilver among the paintings, invoking the mysteries of primordial forces and eras. In the present work, with the application of oil to felt in a characteristically alchemical composition, various golden hues with cascades of silver and ivory paint burst incandescently from the surface. This vast canvas is a pinnacle in Polke’s career-long investigation of what was technically possible in painting; an ambition that reached new heights in the 1980s. Indeed, the commissioner of the 1986 West German Pavilion Dierk Stemmler described the progress of the artist’s contemporaneous work in the following terms: “Sigmar Polke is a transformer, and at the same time an investigator who explores for himself, through innumerable obstinate enquiries and experiments with historical and contemporary materials, the chemico-physical properties and reactions of dyes, lacquers, minerals, metals, and their combinations and mutations under the influx of radiation, light, heat, radioactivity…Incompatibilities crash into one another in enlarged extraneous-familiar spaces, functioning as intermediaries in visual dialogues with the intensity of original representations.” (Dierk Stemmler in General Catalogue: XLII Esposizione internazionale d'arte la biennale di Venezia, Venice, 1986, p. 276)

Majestic layers of depthless yellows, cool blues, and silvery greys provide the shimmering backdrop arena to a glittering panoply of twinkling metallic accents, the play of which constantly adjusts through shifting relationships of light and perspective. 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 pearlescent torrents of paint burst from the center of the painting and splinter across the surface, we are privy to Polke’s most gestural and pictorially compelling painterly flourish. Polke’s sheer technical and aesthetic innovation is supremely represented by Filzschleife, where oil and felt coalesce to form an immense abstract canvas of phenomenal beauty and enduring impact. The present work is archetypal of Polke’s best invention whereby an emphasis on qualities of light and transparency permeate his work, informed no doubt by an apprenticeship he undertook in a stained glass factory in Düsseldorf. Carefully guarded guild secrets since the fifteenth century, the techniques of Bavarian glass painting are known nevertheless to involve complex layers of metallic substances including silver nitrate. A powerful sense of this training is provided here by the contrasts of heavily saturated areas imbued with luscious translucent pigment with the woolly opacity of the felt surface.

The varied textural aplomb of Filzschleife evokes the hasty smudges, eerie shadows, and off-key printer errors of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen masterworks; like the regions of Warhol’s spray-painted surfaces that drip and bleed to expose the painted quality of the image, the present work glows incandescently with radioactive magnetism. The four ellipses that punctuate the very center of the picture bear remnants of Polke’s celebrated raster dot technique, pushed beyond their capacity for representation toward pure, unfettered abstraction. Unlike the glossy, machinelike perfection of Lichtenstein’s uniform, tightly composed pictures, Polke compromises the images he reproduces through manipulating scale and medium, distorting conventional pictorial structures and eroding the resulting image into a ghostly blur. The present work vitally illustrates how the elusive Polke privileged ambiguity over clarity, a character trait reflected in his own reticence toward interviews and speaking publicly about his work. A wunderkind of post-war German art like his close friend Richter, Polke remains a mysterious presence that defies categorization to this day. As Peter Schjeldahl admiringly noted, “To learn more and more about him, it has sometimes seemed to me, is to know less and less. His art is like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland rabbit hole, entrance to a realm of spiraling perplexities, one of which is his uncanny relation to American art, first as a provincial follower and later as a seminal influence.” (Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The Daemon and Sigmar Polke’ in Exh. Cat., San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sigmar Polke, 1990, p. 17)