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Lot Essay
Executed in 2004, Untitled (Ghosts) blends ghost-like shapes, formed out of Sigmar Polke's characteristic raster-dot technique, with an abstract background made up of constantly-changing 'interference colour.' The painting is deliberately ambiguous, a playful and open fusion of abstract, figurative, and modern mechanical means of illustration that hovers on the edge of readability amidst a dancing sea of black-and-white raster-dots and a cloud-like play of varying colours that evokes multiple senses of reality. Using commercially available paint incorporating the light reflective mineral Mica, 'interference colour' beautifully reflects different, metallic looking colours that when combined with the raster-dots creates an alluring and flickering surface in a constant state of flux. Polke particularly liked this effect, as he explained: 'I like the way that the dots in a magnified picture swim and move about. The way that motifs change from recognisable to unrecognisable, the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open... Lots of dots vibrating, resonating, blurring, re-emerging, thoughts of radio signals, radio pictures and television come to mind'. (S. Polke quoted in D. Hülsmanns,Kultur des Rasters. Ateliergespräch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke, in Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966).
Polke's interest with the raster-dot began as a painterly means of investigating the way in which knowledge and information is structured and imparted in contemporary capitalist society, using the raster-dot to call into question the apparent truth of the media-based images that they supposedly convey. On close inspection, the three top forms can be seen to reveal the popular cartoon characters The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By depicting them as a series of dots, it is perhaps representative of the dissolution of viewers into the falsity of contemporary life. Once magnified, his 'Polke-dots' not only demonstrated the falsity of the image they carried, but also became, in their own right, painterly suggestions of another abstract reality of their own making. It is through this visual dichotomy that Untitled (Ghosts) asserts itself as a work that both invokes and is reflective ofa view of the world as a volatile reality that can be seen and experienced through multiple layers of consciousness. It is as a result of addressing such complex issues that Sean Rainbird pointed out on the occasion of Polke's first exhibition at Tate in 1995, 'Painting, far from being a redundant practice in an era of mechanical, electronic and digital communications is shown by Polke to be a resourceful medium equipped to investigate the complexities of contemporary experience'. (S. Rainbird, 'Seams and Appearances', Sigmar Polke: Join the dots, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 1995, p. 9).
Polke's interest with the raster-dot began as a painterly means of investigating the way in which knowledge and information is structured and imparted in contemporary capitalist society, using the raster-dot to call into question the apparent truth of the media-based images that they supposedly convey. On close inspection, the three top forms can be seen to reveal the popular cartoon characters The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By depicting them as a series of dots, it is perhaps representative of the dissolution of viewers into the falsity of contemporary life. Once magnified, his 'Polke-dots' not only demonstrated the falsity of the image they carried, but also became, in their own right, painterly suggestions of another abstract reality of their own making. It is through this visual dichotomy that Untitled (Ghosts) asserts itself as a work that both invokes and is reflective ofa view of the world as a volatile reality that can be seen and experienced through multiple layers of consciousness. It is as a result of addressing such complex issues that Sean Rainbird pointed out on the occasion of Polke's first exhibition at Tate in 1995, 'Painting, far from being a redundant practice in an era of mechanical, electronic and digital communications is shown by Polke to be a resourceful medium equipped to investigate the complexities of contemporary experience'. (S. Rainbird, 'Seams and Appearances', Sigmar Polke: Join the dots, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 1995, p. 9).