(Oels/Lower Silesia 1942- 2010 Cologne)
Untitled, 1998, signed and dated Sigmar Polke 98, acrylic on paper, 150 x 200 cm, framed

We are grateful to The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne, Michael Trier and Nelly Gawellek for the kind scientific assistance.

The present work will be included in the upcoming catalogue of the works on paper of Sigmar Polke being prepared by The Estate of Sigmar Polke.

Provenance:
Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne/New York (label on the reverse)
The Siggi and Sissi Loch Charitable Foundation –
acquired from the above
Christie’s London, 27 June 2012, lot 55
acquired from the above by the present owner-
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Cologne, Galerie Michael Werner, Die Farbe Blau, 13 April 2011 - 30 July 2011

“Polke pushed his materials to the point where reason falters and where things begin to find their form not through the artist’s foresight or deliberate hand but through such non-rational conditions as gravity, accident, and the associative power of the unconscious.”
Kathy Halbreich, Alibis: An Introduction, in exh. cat. Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, The Museum of Modern Art New York (and travelling), New York 2014, p. 66

The production of the pigments was of great importance for Sigmar Polke, who was often described as an alchemist, and he wanted to investigate this from the ground up. With the aid of the most modern techniques and motifs he was constantly searching for the origin of painting, sometimes also with a great deal of irony. Art ought to be an experiment with an open outcome, and he, the artist, ought to elicit the hidden beauty from the material world with his works.

From the 1960s onwards, the individual dots of Sigmar Polke’s raster pictures generate in their total effect an objective image before the eyes of the beholder. With the delicate grid lines, which convert the function of the raster-dot into the negative, Sigmar Polke imparts a magical depth to these large works on paper. Drawn through with a honeycomb structure, and with black lines which vary from subtle dots to bold marks, the fine form creates an association for the viewer with constantly new mental images. A beehive, a compound eye, the structure of the brain from above, a bundle of rabbit hair – the associations are multivalent and individually subjective.

In extreme contrast to the construction and organisation of the grid are the abstract lines in cool blue. They enframe and overlie, cross over and intersect the honeycomb structure and yet they integrate themselves, as a form of disorganisation within the grid network which apparently recedes into endless depth. The painterly illusion achieved by Sigmar Polke with the delicate honeycomb structure creates a stark contrast with the blue, abstract, broad lines and forms. It is the displacement of inorganic to organic, or vice versa, which here is so clearly presented before the eyes of the beholder of Sigmar Polke’s work.

“We cannot count on the fact that one day good pictures will be painted; we have to take care of things ourselves.”
Sigmar Polke