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Lot Essay
Sigmar Polke’s Hôtel de Ville, 5 vor 12, is one of several large-scale paintings made on industrially printed fabric that Polke made throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In creating this work filled with his trademark characteristics, the artist screens and drips paint in large quantities over the regulated patterns of a mass-produced fabric in a way that intentionally thwarts and disrupts the geometry and implied rationality of the original pattern. This intervention articulates a deep sense of world caught in flux.
Bombarding the senses, Hôtel de Ville, 5 vor 12 explodes into view with a cacophony of dots and splashes which at first appear to be rather abstract, then very quickly amalgamate into the famous clock tower of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, complemented by two surrounding images of a Venus-like figure. Working off the ever-present theme of institutionalized time, juxtaposed with the beautiful woman’s lustful physique, the painting is a dramatic illusory exercise in the perception and interpretation of imagery as poetry and rhythm. Polke mixes figurative and abstract imagery with variety of media, including his trademark silkscreen raster dots, which exploit the printing technique as a way as of subverting and bringing into question the apparent truth. He layers one image over another so that the idea of reality as a composite of many shifting layers of perception is successfully conveyed. This creates a unique world that exists outside the bounds of conventional logic as varied elements of this painting combine in an extraordinary way to describe a surreal vision of a reality as a multi-layered dreamscape. As the viewer settles into dialogue with the piece, the image miraculously clarifies, becoming almost photographic. These raster-dots, of the kind formerly used in newspaper printing, and here enlarged and distorted by the artist, emote an image that is only readable when standing well back from the painting. In this way the painting becomes a fascinating play of abstract and figurative and meaningful and meaningless form, interacting with one another to create a new and dramatic reality.
In the present lot, Polke returns to the themes and techniques which marked his artistic rise in the 1960s, but with a renewed material energy borne of his consistent experimentation with mediums throughout the 1970s and 1980s, like painting on fabric as opposed to canvas. Like many of his greatest paintings, the image seems to retain a precarious existence, its raw presentation positing the possibility that it could mutate at any moment between abstraction and figuration.
Fueled by his psychedelic awareness of the limitations of 'normal' perception, Polke uses his wide diversity of imagery as a deliberate and conscious tool to suggest mystery rather than to bring clarity or meaning. In this respect, his aesthetic is like Arthur Rimbaud's, a strictly rational derangement of the senses, and his work follows a logical, almost scientific procedural approach. It is an approach that takes as its starting point the kind of scientific paradox introduced to quantum physics by Werner Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle", which declares that "the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known.” This means, in other words, that perceived reality is an illusion and at best only an approximation of the real state of affairs.
Closely related in his canon of Rasterbilder works, Hôtel de Ville, 5 vor 12 questions the validity and purpose of the media images that his paintings appropriate. In the 1960s, the rastering process was the sole printing process available to the commercial media for the reproduction of a clear photographic image. Using screens of tiny dots, lines and other patterns were layered onto a lined plate in order to give the printed image an appearance of tone. When viewed, these tones combine in the mind’s eye to form a cohesive and recognizable image. In the newspapers of the time, the abstract dotted surface of a printed image appeared visible to the naked eye, but despite the evident artifice of the medium, the mechanically-produced image, like the newspapers themselves, still carried with it an authority that it portrayed a true and accurate picture of the world. It was this authority that Polke’s first Rasterbilder, made in the 1960s, consciously challenged. In these landmark works, the artist deliberately manipulated the raster technique, magnifying the dots, distorting them, and inverting the dot pattern, in order to create a clear ambiguity that disrupts the cohesiveness of the image and opens it up to new ways of being understood. Forming the prompt to his later use of layered and multiple image-works, Polke’s Rasterbilder throw the process by which we see and interpret the world wide-open by revealing the essentially artificial and abstract methods by which all imagery is understood.
Hôtel de Ville, 5 vor 12 stands as an example Polke’s attempts to explore the gaps that exist in conventional logic and perception through a metaphysical approach that attempts to generate a poetic magic between disparate images and objects. "It is clear," the artist has stated, "that a progressive scientific approach like my own can no longer concern effects must come to an end! We must create a world of free and equal phenomena, a world in which things are finally allowed to form relationships once again, relationships liberated from the bonds of servile text-book causality and narrow-minded, finger-pointing consecution... for only in these relationships is it possible to find the true meaning and the true order of things" (S. Polke, "Early Influences, Later Conseque1ces", in: Sigmar Polke. The Three Lies of Painting, Ostfilden-Ruit 1997. pp. 289-290).
Bombarding the senses, Hôtel de Ville, 5 vor 12 explodes into view with a cacophony of dots and splashes which at first appear to be rather abstract, then very quickly amalgamate into the famous clock tower of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, complemented by two surrounding images of a Venus-like figure. Working off the ever-present theme of institutionalized time, juxtaposed with the beautiful woman’s lustful physique, the painting is a dramatic illusory exercise in the perception and interpretation of imagery as poetry and rhythm. Polke mixes figurative and abstract imagery with variety of media, including his trademark silkscreen raster dots, which exploit the printing technique as a way as of subverting and bringing into question the apparent truth. He layers one image over another so that the idea of reality as a composite of many shifting layers of perception is successfully conveyed. This creates a unique world that exists outside the bounds of conventional logic as varied elements of this painting combine in an extraordinary way to describe a surreal vision of a reality as a multi-layered dreamscape. As the viewer settles into dialogue with the piece, the image miraculously clarifies, becoming almost photographic. These raster-dots, of the kind formerly used in newspaper printing, and here enlarged and distorted by the artist, emote an image that is only readable when standing well back from the painting. In this way the painting becomes a fascinating play of abstract and figurative and meaningful and meaningless form, interacting with one another to create a new and dramatic reality.
In the present lot, Polke returns to the themes and techniques which marked his artistic rise in the 1960s, but with a renewed material energy borne of his consistent experimentation with mediums throughout the 1970s and 1980s, like painting on fabric as opposed to canvas. Like many of his greatest paintings, the image seems to retain a precarious existence, its raw presentation positing the possibility that it could mutate at any moment between abstraction and figuration.
Fueled by his psychedelic awareness of the limitations of 'normal' perception, Polke uses his wide diversity of imagery as a deliberate and conscious tool to suggest mystery rather than to bring clarity or meaning. In this respect, his aesthetic is like Arthur Rimbaud's, a strictly rational derangement of the senses, and his work follows a logical, almost scientific procedural approach. It is an approach that takes as its starting point the kind of scientific paradox introduced to quantum physics by Werner Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle", which declares that "the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known.” This means, in other words, that perceived reality is an illusion and at best only an approximation of the real state of affairs.
Closely related in his canon of Rasterbilder works, Hôtel de Ville, 5 vor 12 questions the validity and purpose of the media images that his paintings appropriate. In the 1960s, the rastering process was the sole printing process available to the commercial media for the reproduction of a clear photographic image. Using screens of tiny dots, lines and other patterns were layered onto a lined plate in order to give the printed image an appearance of tone. When viewed, these tones combine in the mind’s eye to form a cohesive and recognizable image. In the newspapers of the time, the abstract dotted surface of a printed image appeared visible to the naked eye, but despite the evident artifice of the medium, the mechanically-produced image, like the newspapers themselves, still carried with it an authority that it portrayed a true and accurate picture of the world. It was this authority that Polke’s first Rasterbilder, made in the 1960s, consciously challenged. In these landmark works, the artist deliberately manipulated the raster technique, magnifying the dots, distorting them, and inverting the dot pattern, in order to create a clear ambiguity that disrupts the cohesiveness of the image and opens it up to new ways of being understood. Forming the prompt to his later use of layered and multiple image-works, Polke’s Rasterbilder throw the process by which we see and interpret the world wide-open by revealing the essentially artificial and abstract methods by which all imagery is understood.
Hôtel de Ville, 5 vor 12 stands as an example Polke’s attempts to explore the gaps that exist in conventional logic and perception through a metaphysical approach that attempts to generate a poetic magic between disparate images and objects. "It is clear," the artist has stated, "that a progressive scientific approach like my own can no longer concern effects must come to an end! We must create a world of free and equal phenomena, a world in which things are finally allowed to form relationships once again, relationships liberated from the bonds of servile text-book causality and narrow-minded, finger-pointing consecution... for only in these relationships is it possible to find the true meaning and the true order of things" (S. Polke, "Early Influences, Later Conseque1ces", in: Sigmar Polke. The Three Lies of Painting, Ostfilden-Ruit 1997. pp. 289-290).