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Lot Essay
‘He wanted to demonstrate how the unconscious, in combination with all other forms of knowledge, casts its shadow on how we imagine. By being aware of the fictive nature of the order we impose, by embracing ambiguity and letting go of certainty, we free ourselves of the need for – and the comfort of – a single authoritarian vision.’ – Kathy Halbreich
‘I like it when my art includes references to the past, to my roots. I cannot forget what my precursors have done. Even if the results look new, as far as I am concerned, as an artist I’m following an academic path. I like tracking down certain pictures, techniques and procedures. It is a way of understanding what is largely determined by tradition.’ – Sigmar Polke
‘In a sense, Polke’s oeuvre consists of nothing but reminders of how precious and formative transgressions are. Few artists have pursued as doggedly as he has the pleasures of aesthetic combustibility by mixing and mismatching forms and ideas.’ – Paul Chan
Layering colour over colour, Sigmar Polke’s Untitled, 1986, is a hallucinogenic surface of hypnotic abstraction. Set atop a rectangle of polka-dotted fabric, a whirlwind of coppery varnish ravages the painting, consuming everything in its wake. Iridescent green and periwinkle brace against the impending golden drips, while, along the edges, a misty white slowly seeps inwards. To achieve the deep purples, which streak in places across the surface, Polke painstakingly extracted pigment from the gland of Murex trunculus, or small sea snail, a process that harkens back to when Tyrian, or imperial purple, was highly sought after and could not be artificially manufactured. Polke alluded to this in his delicate spiral and calligraphic inscription on the reverse of the painting, elevating the mollusc to the role of co-creator: Polke working together with Murex trunculus. Polke began his fabric paintings in the mid-1960s, often selecting inexpensive textiles used in homemaking and interior design as tablecloths, aprons or curtains, applying patterns to the surface like paint on a canvas. From the beginning, he manipulated the material to play with scale and improvisation. In Untitled, the cream dots seem as integral and painterly as any of the oil paint and lacquer drips, recalling the artist’s earlier use of raster dots, which he found to be the best expression of a fluctuating reality. Indeed, Polke’s art chased the mystical and mysterious, to demonstrate th falseness of believing in a stabilized world; through the unpredictable and spontaneous mutability of his materials, he encouraged and celebrated the duplicity of the unconscious, as the means of producing a result. 1986 was a significant year in Polke’s career, during which he represented Germany at the 42nd Venice Biennale, where his exhibition, Athanor, took alchemy as its starting point. From the 1980s onwards, Polke experimented primarily with abstraction, often fusing ornamental detail with surfaces suggestive of an alchemical transformation. As curator Kathy Halbreich writes, ‘In place of purity, Polke sought the shadows in which things come to be. Flux prevailed and anything that appeared fixed was quickly set aside’ (K. Halbreich, ‘Alibis: An Introduction’, Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963 – 2010, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 69). Ambiguous yet potent, Untitled is a testament to his passion for wild experimentation, mediated by the allure of lustrous, undefinable colour, which was so important to Polke: ‘I started thinking about colour and its treatment... how, for example, Hinduism explains and uses colour or how Australians use colour... Seeing how colours are made, out of what kind of earth, I couldn’t resist them’ (S. Polke quoted in ‘Poison is Effective; Panting is Not: Bice Curiger In Conversation with Sigmar Polke’, Parkett, no. 26, 1990). Untitled, too, is otherworldly yet organic, as if it was born of a telluric current, the processes unseen by the human eye, a splash of beguiling colour, forever unresolved.
‘I like it when my art includes references to the past, to my roots. I cannot forget what my precursors have done. Even if the results look new, as far as I am concerned, as an artist I’m following an academic path. I like tracking down certain pictures, techniques and procedures. It is a way of understanding what is largely determined by tradition.’ – Sigmar Polke
‘In a sense, Polke’s oeuvre consists of nothing but reminders of how precious and formative transgressions are. Few artists have pursued as doggedly as he has the pleasures of aesthetic combustibility by mixing and mismatching forms and ideas.’ – Paul Chan
Layering colour over colour, Sigmar Polke’s Untitled, 1986, is a hallucinogenic surface of hypnotic abstraction. Set atop a rectangle of polka-dotted fabric, a whirlwind of coppery varnish ravages the painting, consuming everything in its wake. Iridescent green and periwinkle brace against the impending golden drips, while, along the edges, a misty white slowly seeps inwards. To achieve the deep purples, which streak in places across the surface, Polke painstakingly extracted pigment from the gland of Murex trunculus, or small sea snail, a process that harkens back to when Tyrian, or imperial purple, was highly sought after and could not be artificially manufactured. Polke alluded to this in his delicate spiral and calligraphic inscription on the reverse of the painting, elevating the mollusc to the role of co-creator: Polke working together with Murex trunculus. Polke began his fabric paintings in the mid-1960s, often selecting inexpensive textiles used in homemaking and interior design as tablecloths, aprons or curtains, applying patterns to the surface like paint on a canvas. From the beginning, he manipulated the material to play with scale and improvisation. In Untitled, the cream dots seem as integral and painterly as any of the oil paint and lacquer drips, recalling the artist’s earlier use of raster dots, which he found to be the best expression of a fluctuating reality. Indeed, Polke’s art chased the mystical and mysterious, to demonstrate th falseness of believing in a stabilized world; through the unpredictable and spontaneous mutability of his materials, he encouraged and celebrated the duplicity of the unconscious, as the means of producing a result. 1986 was a significant year in Polke’s career, during which he represented Germany at the 42nd Venice Biennale, where his exhibition, Athanor, took alchemy as its starting point. From the 1980s onwards, Polke experimented primarily with abstraction, often fusing ornamental detail with surfaces suggestive of an alchemical transformation. As curator Kathy Halbreich writes, ‘In place of purity, Polke sought the shadows in which things come to be. Flux prevailed and anything that appeared fixed was quickly set aside’ (K. Halbreich, ‘Alibis: An Introduction’, Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963 – 2010, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 69). Ambiguous yet potent, Untitled is a testament to his passion for wild experimentation, mediated by the allure of lustrous, undefinable colour, which was so important to Polke: ‘I started thinking about colour and its treatment... how, for example, Hinduism explains and uses colour or how Australians use colour... Seeing how colours are made, out of what kind of earth, I couldn’t resist them’ (S. Polke quoted in ‘Poison is Effective; Panting is Not: Bice Curiger In Conversation with Sigmar Polke’, Parkett, no. 26, 1990). Untitled, too, is otherworldly yet organic, as if it was born of a telluric current, the processes unseen by the human eye, a splash of beguiling colour, forever unresolved.