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Lot Essay
A woman on a bed emerges from a shimmering screen of black-and-white dots in Sigmar Polke’s Untitled (2000). In high heels and on all fours, she presents an overtly erotic image. Yet she faces away from the viewer, and Polke’s trademark ‘raster’ technique—which mimics and magnifies the dots of halftone printing—renders her form hazy and ambiguous. The headboard merges with an amorphous mass of shadow in the background, abstracting the setting and heightening its sense of mystery. Polke’s raster-dots, which he began painting in 1960s Düsseldorf, were a central strategy in a practice that engaged inventively with the mutability and trickery of images. Relating closely to the early masterpieces Freundinnen (Girlfriends) (1965-1966, Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart) and Bunnies (1966, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.), the present work performs something of a painterly striptease: an optical dance between showing and concealing. Polke’s raster visuals work to trip up the image’s titillating subject matter, wryly subverting its connotations of clichéd male desire and the status of the female body as an object of consumption.
Polke, who had emigrated as a child from East to West Germany in 1953, mistrusted fixed, authoritarian structures in any form, and his works were themselves purposefully ambiguous and unstable. His paintings offered feedback on a world conveyed by mass media, their complex, hybrid imagery and techniques capturing the visual cascade of magazines, advertising, tabloids and television. While he took this vision in diverse, dizzying directions—encompassing experiments with psychedelics, patterned textiles, glow-in-the-dark pigment, translucent canvases, holographic lenses, and the glitchy smears of an abused photocopier—the raster-dots, which represented the smallest visual molecules of the printed picture, retained their importance throughout his career.
Polke’s dots—which he usually painted by hand—are distinct from the more rigid Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein, and offer an important sense of flux. He did not glorify the consumer culture he depicted in his raster images, but rather explored the dots’ qualities as an imperfect, all-encompassing architecture of seeing. ‘The raster is for me a system, a principle, a method, a structure’, he said in 1966. ‘It decomposes, distributes, orders, and equalises everything. 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 … it is a general situation and interpretation: the structure of our time, the structure of a social order, of a culture’ (S. Polke, quoted in D. Hülsmanns, ‘Kulter des Rasters: Ateliergerspräch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke’, Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966).
Polke’s use of erotic imagery dates back to the late sixties: a moment when ideas of sexual and political liberation were closely entwined, and a countercultural revolution was sweeping the western world. Some leftist groups even promoted the concept of political pornography during this period. Such utopian visions, however, were hijacked almost as soon as they emerged by inevitable chauvinism and the rise of the commercial porn industry. Polke’s risqué rasters toy provocatively with this state of affairs, at once offering the illusory image of woman-as-sex-object and refuting its status as anything other than a field of painted dots. ‘The inability of the viewer to see clearly,’ notes John Caldwell, ‘precisely mimics the way we look at such erotically tinged material in newspapers, with the instantly quickened impulse of desire frustrated by the impossibility of actually seeing anything through the blurry grid of newsprint’ (J. Caldwell, ‘Sigmar Polke’, in Sigmar Polke, exh. cat. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco 1990, p. 10). Both painting a picture and allowing it to escape into abstraction, the present work frees its female subject from the pornographic gaze: every dot holds the potential for the image to be other than what it seems, or to shift slyly into something new.
Polke, who had emigrated as a child from East to West Germany in 1953, mistrusted fixed, authoritarian structures in any form, and his works were themselves purposefully ambiguous and unstable. His paintings offered feedback on a world conveyed by mass media, their complex, hybrid imagery and techniques capturing the visual cascade of magazines, advertising, tabloids and television. While he took this vision in diverse, dizzying directions—encompassing experiments with psychedelics, patterned textiles, glow-in-the-dark pigment, translucent canvases, holographic lenses, and the glitchy smears of an abused photocopier—the raster-dots, which represented the smallest visual molecules of the printed picture, retained their importance throughout his career.
Polke’s dots—which he usually painted by hand—are distinct from the more rigid Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein, and offer an important sense of flux. He did not glorify the consumer culture he depicted in his raster images, but rather explored the dots’ qualities as an imperfect, all-encompassing architecture of seeing. ‘The raster is for me a system, a principle, a method, a structure’, he said in 1966. ‘It decomposes, distributes, orders, and equalises everything. 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 … it is a general situation and interpretation: the structure of our time, the structure of a social order, of a culture’ (S. Polke, quoted in D. Hülsmanns, ‘Kulter des Rasters: Ateliergerspräch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke’, Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966).
Polke’s use of erotic imagery dates back to the late sixties: a moment when ideas of sexual and political liberation were closely entwined, and a countercultural revolution was sweeping the western world. Some leftist groups even promoted the concept of political pornography during this period. Such utopian visions, however, were hijacked almost as soon as they emerged by inevitable chauvinism and the rise of the commercial porn industry. Polke’s risqué rasters toy provocatively with this state of affairs, at once offering the illusory image of woman-as-sex-object and refuting its status as anything other than a field of painted dots. ‘The inability of the viewer to see clearly,’ notes John Caldwell, ‘precisely mimics the way we look at such erotically tinged material in newspapers, with the instantly quickened impulse of desire frustrated by the impossibility of actually seeing anything through the blurry grid of newsprint’ (J. Caldwell, ‘Sigmar Polke’, in Sigmar Polke, exh. cat. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco 1990, p. 10). Both painting a picture and allowing it to escape into abstraction, the present work frees its female subject from the pornographic gaze: every dot holds the potential for the image to be other than what it seems, or to shift slyly into something new.