西格馬·波爾克

Galerie Ha.Jo. Müller, Cologne
Alfred Kren, New York and Cologne
Private Collection, USA
Sale: Phillips de Pury & Company, London, Contemporary Art, 22 June 2007, Lot 43
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Paris, Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Sigmar Polke, 1988
Pittsburgh, The Carnegie Museum of Art (long-term loan), 1990-99

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the red is slightly brighter in the original and there are more purple hues to the top half of the composition. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Very close inspection reveals a minute tear to the centre of the painting towards the bottom edge. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Portraying a nude female figure lying indolent and uninhibited on an abstract background, Nackte from 1988 is an arresting example of Sigmar Polke’s dexterous dominion of painterly and photographic techniques and materials. A fusion of several elements that characterize his internationally acclaimed oeuvre, Nackte blends the raster graphic – which brought him critical recognition in the 1960s – and a mix of experimental abstraction with the use of transparent synthetic fabric, which characterizes the artist’s exploratory works of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The present work was prestigiously exhibited soon after its completion in a seminal retrospective exhibition organized by the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and was later lent to the permanent collection of The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where it resided for nine years. Created at the height of Polke’s career, Nackte is a striking example of the artist’s mature work, in which he allowed himself to mix several of the techniques on which he had worked throughout his lifetime.

Depicting a languishing female body, the present work embodies a rumination on the art-historical paradigm of the ideal female odalisque. Arguably belonging to the corpus of work Polke created in response to icons of art history throughout his career, Nackte is strongly reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s Woman with Parrot (1866). Within this particular body of paintings Polke paid homage to some of the great masters of art history, either directly referencing their work as in his celebrated Goya series which he started in 1982, or by taking inspiration as in the paintings exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1986; works inspired by Albrecht Dürer, that earned him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Nackte, in her languid pose, recalls the great lineage of painters who portrayed the female nude, aligning the artist with a tradition that dates back several hundreds of years. Redolent of the atmosphere of the opium dens depicted in Oriental fashion typical of the Nineteenth Century, Nackte is suggestive of Polke’s personal experiences of the ‘80s, when not only did he experiment with the material properties of the variety of media he was working with but also travelled widely and experimented with hallucinogenic substances. Nackte is indeed imbued with a psychedelic and dreamlike effect: a variety of white splashes apparently dripping towards the centre of the composition and an abstract background in a mélange of colours and tonalities acting as her boudoir.

Sigmar Polke created Nackte by enlarging a found image to a monumental scale and then transferring it by hand to the synthetic fabric he employed as a canvas. Having first used this technique in the 1960s as a response to American Pop Art (whose artists replicated the mechanical qualities associated with mass production) Polke’s raster graphic explicitly revealed the human errors that became apparent once the half-tone dots were blown up. The present work amalgamates the artist’s trademark technique of his early work with the period of intense artistic and personal experimentation during the ‘70s and ‘80s. An enthusiast of photography, Polke did not only use imagery from magazines and newspapers but also took thousands of photographs throughout his lifetime that were often used later as source material for his paintings. Becoming increasingly interested in the developing process of photography, during the ‘70s the artist tried different chemicals and techniques in each of its stages. It is works of these decades that reveal how Polke became increasingly interested in the process of making over the final result.

Sigmar Polke’s Nackte stands at the zenith of the artist’s ability to blend tradition and innovation, exhibiting his astonishing command of technique and materials. Lying in delicate balance between abstraction and figuration, the luscious figure embodies Polke at his very best. As Maria Morris Hamburg compellingly describes: “Better than Gabriel García Márquez’s gypsy alchemist, Polke can arouse the souls of things. It is a power that he can never unlearn or give back” (Maria Morris Hambourg, ‘Polke’s Recipes for Arousing the Soul’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sigmar Polke. Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, 1995-96, p. 57).