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Lot Essay
Veils of diaphanous lacquer swell and fold in Sigmar Polke’s Ohne Titel (Schüttbild) (Untitled (Pour Painting)), a shimmering, stellar flare rendered in ochre and cream. The uncertain and indefinite composition is tantalisingly otherworldly, born it seems in the chasm between this world and the imaginary. Created in 1996 – during a decade that saw major solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and elsewhere – the work forms part of the artist’s long-running series of Schüttbilder (Pour Paintings), in which colours and substances were allowed to pool freely across paper or fabric. It also reflects the artist’s fascination with cloud formations during this period – inspired in part by Chinese landscape paintings – inviting comparison with the monumental Cloud Paintings (1992-2009) held in the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Vestiges of the artist’s early training as a glass painter are visible in the painting’s gossamer undulations: to masterfully manipulate painted glass requires an understanding of the relationship between light and pigment, the study of which gave Polke a lifelong awareness of this interplay. Indeed, the work appears to be made of overlapping strata, as if it is meant to be both looked at and looked through.
Be it glass surfaces or painterly combustions, the transformative, totemic potential of materials was always central to Polke’s practice. Early on, he was enthralled by the magic chemistry of the darkroom, a fascination which later shifted towards the incorporation of unconventional, even lethal, materials: Tyrian purple, gold, arsenic, and resin, among countless others. He first began to explore lacquer’s unpredictable properties in the early 1960s, returning to the medium with renewed flair during the 1980s and 1990s. Polke sought a new visual vocabulary predicated upon materiality, chance, and mutation, an ambition which drove his practice to new heights. He took inspiration from Werner Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’, a fundamental law of particle physics first established in the 1920s, which declares that ‘the more precisely that the position of an entity is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known’. The principle proposes an understanding of reality as neither fixed nor stable, but instead influenced and revealed through shifting contexts. Polke initially grasped the Uncertainty Principle after exploratory use of psychedelic drugs during the 1960s and 1970s; he was one of the first artists who made this tenet a provocation for his practice. Loathe to inflict a predetermined plan upon his compositions, Polke instead relinquished control and allowed his paintings to shape themselves. In Ohne Titel (Schüttbild), the washes of paint cascade spontaneously across the silk ground as if governed by a mysterious and imperceptible current.
As the artist Peter Doig observed, ‘There have been a few other artists over the years that have used material in a somewhat similar way, but their work always seems quite decorative, whereas with Sigmar’s work it was integral to the way he works and the way he thinks. You do believe that he is a magician or a conjurer or alchemist’ (P. Doig in conversation with M. Godfrey, ‘Sigmar Polke: A contemporary Visionary’, Tate Etc., vol. 32, 5 December 2014). Certainly, this alchemical enchantment is evident in the gestural waves of the present work, whose rippling surface seems to be constantly metamorphosing. But Polke’s magic is woven equally into the very act of looking: to regard Ohne Titel (Schüttbild) is to embrace the fluctuating and mutable nature of perception, a state which is inherently dynamic, capricious, revitalising, renewed.
Be it glass surfaces or painterly combustions, the transformative, totemic potential of materials was always central to Polke’s practice. Early on, he was enthralled by the magic chemistry of the darkroom, a fascination which later shifted towards the incorporation of unconventional, even lethal, materials: Tyrian purple, gold, arsenic, and resin, among countless others. He first began to explore lacquer’s unpredictable properties in the early 1960s, returning to the medium with renewed flair during the 1980s and 1990s. Polke sought a new visual vocabulary predicated upon materiality, chance, and mutation, an ambition which drove his practice to new heights. He took inspiration from Werner Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’, a fundamental law of particle physics first established in the 1920s, which declares that ‘the more precisely that the position of an entity is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known’. The principle proposes an understanding of reality as neither fixed nor stable, but instead influenced and revealed through shifting contexts. Polke initially grasped the Uncertainty Principle after exploratory use of psychedelic drugs during the 1960s and 1970s; he was one of the first artists who made this tenet a provocation for his practice. Loathe to inflict a predetermined plan upon his compositions, Polke instead relinquished control and allowed his paintings to shape themselves. In Ohne Titel (Schüttbild), the washes of paint cascade spontaneously across the silk ground as if governed by a mysterious and imperceptible current.
As the artist Peter Doig observed, ‘There have been a few other artists over the years that have used material in a somewhat similar way, but their work always seems quite decorative, whereas with Sigmar’s work it was integral to the way he works and the way he thinks. You do believe that he is a magician or a conjurer or alchemist’ (P. Doig in conversation with M. Godfrey, ‘Sigmar Polke: A contemporary Visionary’, Tate Etc., vol. 32, 5 December 2014). Certainly, this alchemical enchantment is evident in the gestural waves of the present work, whose rippling surface seems to be constantly metamorphosing. But Polke’s magic is woven equally into the very act of looking: to regard Ohne Titel (Schüttbild) is to embrace the fluctuating and mutable nature of perception, a state which is inherently dynamic, capricious, revitalising, renewed.