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拍品专文
A complex dance between material chance, mechanical production and free painterly invention, How Fish Can Boost Your Brain Power (2003) is a mesmerising large-scale abstraction by Sigmar Polke. The support consists of a square red tablecloth printed with a geometric design of floral motifs in white and ochre. Atop this Polke has applied large, opaque pools of white dispersion pigment, alternately masking them off against the framing corners of the tablecloth’s pattern and letting them flood into amorphous puddles and tendrils. These painted zones are themselves overlaid with two different registers of Polke’s distinctive raster-dots, which emulate the visual language of halftone printing: the left appears as a field of large white on black polka-dots, while the right is dominated by more zoomed-out dots which shade from dark to light in horizontal strips. Both are distorted by blurs and warps, as if dragged drunkenly through a photocopier. Patches of dilute red paint on top of the black-and-white areas add a final layer of pictorial confusion, plunging foreground and background into psychedelic uncertainty. Is the tablecloth obscured by veils of monochrome pattern, or dissolving to reveal an alternate world behind it? With delight in picture-making’s magical and material properties, Polke presents the work’s surface as a screen of rich possibility: its playful title foregrounds an expansion of the eye and the mind.
The present work stems from a fertile period in Polke’s relentlessly inventive career. In 2002, he had been awarded Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale art prize; in 2003, he debuted a group of recent paintings and drawings in a major show at the Dallas Museum of Art, which travelled to Tate Modern as The History of Everything. Much of the exhibition appeared to critique the role of America in global politics, while toying with notions of the ‘West’. Polke, who had emigrated as a child from East to West Germany fifty years earlier, mistrusted fixed, authoritarian structures in any form, and his works were themselves purposefully ambiguous and unstable. With no dominant layer or vantage point from which to read it, How Fish Can Boost Your Brain Power is typically hard to pin down. The raster-dots—which Polke began using in the 1960s—are distinct from the more rigid Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein, offering an important sense of flux. ‘I like the way that the dots in a magnified picture swim and move about’, Polke said of his early Rasterbilder. ‘The way that motifs change from recognizable to unrecognizable, the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open … Many dots vibrating, swinging, blurring, reappearing: one could think of radio signals, telegraphic images, television come to mind’ (S. Polke, quoted in D. Hülsmanns, ‘Kulter des Rasters: Ateliergespräch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke’, Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966). During the mid-nineties he took this mutable, multi-channelled vision further by deliberately misusing a Xerox machine, moving printed images quickly across the scanning bed to create glitchy smears and mutations of form. He went on to apply these lessons to screenprints, slide projections and paintings alike: How Fish Can Boost Your Brain Power sees the method arrive at a hypnotic, organic abstract splendour.
Beyond painting and printing, Polke experimented extensively with photography and chemical processes and used a vast range of unorthodox materials throughout his career, from silver nitrate to uranium, meteor dust, resins, lacquers, and Tyrian purple—a rare dye extracted from a sea snail. His ‘machine painting’ technique, developed in the early 2000s, allowed works to be produced entirely by mechanical means. Mass-produced textiles were also an important element of his work, functioning in a variety of different ways. In some instances they formed part of his critique of post-war Germany’s bourgeois consumerism, collapsing ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in satirical, Pop-inflected mode. His celebrated Hochsitz (Watchtower) paintings of 1984-88, with their watchtowers’ ominous military outlines hovering amid grounds of chintzy fabric, figure a dark spectre in the country’s domestic consciousness. Elsewhere, printed patterns might serve to parody the ‘all-over’ painterly surfaces of Abstract Expressionism, or, interacting with overlaid imagery, to evoke the free-associative visual effects of hallucinogenic drugs, which had a formative impact on Polke during the 1970s. How Fish Can Boost Your Brain Power brings together these ideas with mind-bending brilliance. From printing to hand-painting, quotation to invention, chaos to composition, it ripples in a wealth of perceptual possibilities. Even as the illusions of support and pigment are laid bare, the picture’s enigmatic surface seems born of some kind of enchantment. Both mystic and materialist, Polke presents the beauty of seeing from manifold points of view.
The present work stems from a fertile period in Polke’s relentlessly inventive career. In 2002, he had been awarded Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale art prize; in 2003, he debuted a group of recent paintings and drawings in a major show at the Dallas Museum of Art, which travelled to Tate Modern as The History of Everything. Much of the exhibition appeared to critique the role of America in global politics, while toying with notions of the ‘West’. Polke, who had emigrated as a child from East to West Germany fifty years earlier, mistrusted fixed, authoritarian structures in any form, and his works were themselves purposefully ambiguous and unstable. With no dominant layer or vantage point from which to read it, How Fish Can Boost Your Brain Power is typically hard to pin down. The raster-dots—which Polke began using in the 1960s—are distinct from the more rigid Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein, offering an important sense of flux. ‘I like the way that the dots in a magnified picture swim and move about’, Polke said of his early Rasterbilder. ‘The way that motifs change from recognizable to unrecognizable, the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open … Many dots vibrating, swinging, blurring, reappearing: one could think of radio signals, telegraphic images, television come to mind’ (S. Polke, quoted in D. Hülsmanns, ‘Kulter des Rasters: Ateliergespräch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke’, Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966). During the mid-nineties he took this mutable, multi-channelled vision further by deliberately misusing a Xerox machine, moving printed images quickly across the scanning bed to create glitchy smears and mutations of form. He went on to apply these lessons to screenprints, slide projections and paintings alike: How Fish Can Boost Your Brain Power sees the method arrive at a hypnotic, organic abstract splendour.
Beyond painting and printing, Polke experimented extensively with photography and chemical processes and used a vast range of unorthodox materials throughout his career, from silver nitrate to uranium, meteor dust, resins, lacquers, and Tyrian purple—a rare dye extracted from a sea snail. His ‘machine painting’ technique, developed in the early 2000s, allowed works to be produced entirely by mechanical means. Mass-produced textiles were also an important element of his work, functioning in a variety of different ways. In some instances they formed part of his critique of post-war Germany’s bourgeois consumerism, collapsing ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in satirical, Pop-inflected mode. His celebrated Hochsitz (Watchtower) paintings of 1984-88, with their watchtowers’ ominous military outlines hovering amid grounds of chintzy fabric, figure a dark spectre in the country’s domestic consciousness. Elsewhere, printed patterns might serve to parody the ‘all-over’ painterly surfaces of Abstract Expressionism, or, interacting with overlaid imagery, to evoke the free-associative visual effects of hallucinogenic drugs, which had a formative impact on Polke during the 1970s. How Fish Can Boost Your Brain Power brings together these ideas with mind-bending brilliance. From printing to hand-painting, quotation to invention, chaos to composition, it ripples in a wealth of perceptual possibilities. Even as the illusions of support and pigment are laid bare, the picture’s enigmatic surface seems born of some kind of enchantment. Both mystic and materialist, Polke presents the beauty of seeing from manifold points of view.