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Lot Essay
‘It’s the procedures in and for themselves that interest me. The picture isn’t really necessary.’
–Sigmar Polke
‘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.’
–Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke’s Untitled displays a beguiling combination of two distinct styles of painting first pioneered by the artist in the 1960s: his Stoffbilder (fabric paintings) and his Rasterbilder (Raster-dot paintings). Executed in 1993, the painting elegantly fuses these practices into a powerful and singular Pop Art-inspired image, which seems to hover somewhere between abstraction and figuration. The canvas has been stretched with an intricately patterned fabric of tightly packed red and yellow checkers, over which is splayed a swirling, sprawling mass configured of white and black dots. Arresting in its juxtaposition, the collocation creates a striking interplay of optical illusion, each vibrant pattern pulsating against the other. The central form, composed using acrylic and dispersion on top of the printed fabric, at first glance appears to take an amorphous and abstract shape. Polke would frequently allow his compositions to evolve independently of the artist’s touch by leaving pigment to disperse across his ready-made fabrics. As Sean Rainbird comments, ‘[Polke’s works] are often readable only as fragments depicting human agency, against the increasingly unstructured grounds on which he has limited the autograph mark by allowing the liquids he applies to find their own final shape’ (S. Rainbird, ‘Seams and Appearances: learning to paint with Sigmar Polke,’ in Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots, exh. cat., Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1995, p. 22). Indeed, as the eyes begin to focus, the vision of a well-dressed man begins to emerge from the sea of dots: suited and booted, he gazes outwards, a hammer or gavel grasped firmly in his hand. His air of stature and importance becomes highly comical in relation to his incongruous and stylised surroundings. Combining – and exaggerating – elements of Georges Seurat’s pointillism and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art, Polke creates a magnetic pictorial display which simultaneously produces and exposes the artifice of its illusionary magic.
Flitting in and out of moments of sharp clarity and hazy impalpability, Untitled resonates with an ambiguity typical of the artist’s work. Addressing this very elusiveness, Polke has 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 Alibis: Sigmar Polke, California, 2014, p. 74). In such a way, Untitled becomes a picture made both for and in response to our modern, image-saturated world of mass-media and its endless production and reproduction of imagery and icons. Like much of Polke’s work, this striking painting is at once a self-demonstrating illusion that displays itself to be a playful manipulation of imagery, and a self-reflexive contemplation aimed at calling the whole nature of vision, perception and reality into question. By visually exposing the structures and codes by which random, abstract chaos becomes order, method and meaning, Polke toys with what it is to conceive and perceive information. Addressing Polke’s life-long fascination with dots, Rainbird has written, ‘Polke’s preoccupation with dots lay in a fascination with the devices and codes by which knowledge is structured and imparted. The magnified dots are based on a system of mechanical reproduction that denies the authentic touch and thus reduces the aura of individual “finish”. … In these endless hand-painted variations and combinations lay, ironically, the power of the painter to undermine the dominance of the subject’ (S. Rainbird, ‘Seams and Appearances: Learning to Paint with Sigmar Polke’, Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots, exh. cat., Liverpool, 1995, p. 12). Indeed, in his ‘Polke-dot’ images, a term coined by the artist himself, Polke majestically and humorously fuses elements of the abstract, the allegorical and the modern-day mechanical.
–Sigmar Polke
‘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.’
–Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke’s Untitled displays a beguiling combination of two distinct styles of painting first pioneered by the artist in the 1960s: his Stoffbilder (fabric paintings) and his Rasterbilder (Raster-dot paintings). Executed in 1993, the painting elegantly fuses these practices into a powerful and singular Pop Art-inspired image, which seems to hover somewhere between abstraction and figuration. The canvas has been stretched with an intricately patterned fabric of tightly packed red and yellow checkers, over which is splayed a swirling, sprawling mass configured of white and black dots. Arresting in its juxtaposition, the collocation creates a striking interplay of optical illusion, each vibrant pattern pulsating against the other. The central form, composed using acrylic and dispersion on top of the printed fabric, at first glance appears to take an amorphous and abstract shape. Polke would frequently allow his compositions to evolve independently of the artist’s touch by leaving pigment to disperse across his ready-made fabrics. As Sean Rainbird comments, ‘[Polke’s works] are often readable only as fragments depicting human agency, against the increasingly unstructured grounds on which he has limited the autograph mark by allowing the liquids he applies to find their own final shape’ (S. Rainbird, ‘Seams and Appearances: learning to paint with Sigmar Polke,’ in Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots, exh. cat., Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1995, p. 22). Indeed, as the eyes begin to focus, the vision of a well-dressed man begins to emerge from the sea of dots: suited and booted, he gazes outwards, a hammer or gavel grasped firmly in his hand. His air of stature and importance becomes highly comical in relation to his incongruous and stylised surroundings. Combining – and exaggerating – elements of Georges Seurat’s pointillism and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art, Polke creates a magnetic pictorial display which simultaneously produces and exposes the artifice of its illusionary magic.
Flitting in and out of moments of sharp clarity and hazy impalpability, Untitled resonates with an ambiguity typical of the artist’s work. Addressing this very elusiveness, Polke has 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 Alibis: Sigmar Polke, California, 2014, p. 74). In such a way, Untitled becomes a picture made both for and in response to our modern, image-saturated world of mass-media and its endless production and reproduction of imagery and icons. Like much of Polke’s work, this striking painting is at once a self-demonstrating illusion that displays itself to be a playful manipulation of imagery, and a self-reflexive contemplation aimed at calling the whole nature of vision, perception and reality into question. By visually exposing the structures and codes by which random, abstract chaos becomes order, method and meaning, Polke toys with what it is to conceive and perceive information. Addressing Polke’s life-long fascination with dots, Rainbird has written, ‘Polke’s preoccupation with dots lay in a fascination with the devices and codes by which knowledge is structured and imparted. The magnified dots are based on a system of mechanical reproduction that denies the authentic touch and thus reduces the aura of individual “finish”. … In these endless hand-painted variations and combinations lay, ironically, the power of the painter to undermine the dominance of the subject’ (S. Rainbird, ‘Seams and Appearances: Learning to Paint with Sigmar Polke’, Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots, exh. cat., Liverpool, 1995, p. 12). Indeed, in his ‘Polke-dot’ images, a term coined by the artist himself, Polke majestically and humorously fuses elements of the abstract, the allegorical and the modern-day mechanical.