Untitled

Combining three distinct scenes and swirl of pigments, Sigmar Polke’s Untitled, 1976, is a cinematic plunge into multiple dimensions. The painting’s composition orbits around a central scene: a man and a young child confront a pack of wolves. These two figures look to have been traced with a stencil, but are, in fact, hand painted, composed of Polke’s signature raster dots, which he made throughout his career by layering halftones. Black asphalt is superimposed over a ruby red car, and although driverless, the vehicle zooms along the open road. Dangling from the upper edge Polke has spray-painted a heather-blue man, who floats effortlessly even as he tumbles towards the earth. Drips and splatters of silvery paint flicker in the light and curl into a phantom topography. Against a backdrop of sundown orange, the liquid spaces of Untitled fuse.
1976 was a significant year in Polke’s career, during which he completed his comic series We Petty Bourgeois! Comrades and Contemporaries, a cycle of ten monumental compositions described as ‘painterly feedback on a world conveyed via mass media’ (P. Lange-Berndt and D. Rübel (eds), Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois!, Cologne, 2011, p. 31). Challenging painting as a medium to respond to the constantly transmuting contemporary moment is at the heart of Polke’s practice; as the artist himself said, ‘I can only live in pictures’ (S. Polke quoted in B. Curiger, ‘Soul of a Child’, Parkett, vol. 2, 1984, p. 39). Within the overlapping pictorial strata of Untitled, the variegated colours and palimpsest of imagery suggest an unfixed reality comprising endless, concurrent possibilities; it is Polke’s abstracted, almost hallucinatory experience of the modern world.