(Oels/Lower Silesia 1942–2010 Cologne)
Untitled, signed and dated Sigmar Polke 1986, acrylic and gouache on cardboard, 199 x 135.5 cm, framed, (PS)

The present work was presented to the Sigmar Polke Estate, Cologne, and will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné.
We are grateful to Mr Michael Trier, Sigmar Polke Estate, Cologne for his kind assistence.

Provenance:
Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne (gallery label to the reverse of the frame)
Private Collection, Germany

“When I came back from my journey, I immediately set myself to work and painted a lot. This was in 1981/82. Then I started thinking about colour and the way to deal with it. I also meditated about the way in which, for example, Hinduism explains and uses colour, or how Australians use it, how they obtain colour and what colour is. And this whole thing of the red, yellow and green colours from the tube, which certainly has its reasons – and I started wondering what this all means. Then I came to think about colour psychology, which is practised here somehow, and what can be done with colour. But when you see how colours are actually produced, for instance what type of earth is used [... ]
So I became involved with colours, however I didn’t settle on earth colours, but on violet.
A wholly abstract thing that only exists here.”(1)
(1) Sigmar Polke, la peinture est une ignonimie interwie pas Bice Curiger, Art Press Nr. 91 Paris 1984, S. 8

“It is the processes in and of themselves that interest me. The picture isn’t really necessary. The unpredictable proves to be the most interesting thing.”(1)

In the 1960s, Sigmar Polke founded a new artistic movement, called “Capitalist Realism” (“Kapitalistischer Realismus”) with Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg and Manfred Kuttner. Their works parodied the needs of postwar German society. However, Polke’s strategies were heterogeneous and hardly fit into a clear-cut artistic current. Sigmar Polke, the person and the artist, is an enigma to many people. Perpetually astonishing and unpredictable, his art eludes the comfortable structures and strictures or a linear history or neat classification.

“I like it when my art includes references to the past, to my roots. I cannot forget what my precursors have done. Even if the results look new, as far as I am concerned, as an artist I am following an academic path. I like tracking down certain pictures, techniques and procedures. It’s a way of understanding what it largely determined by tradition. The more you know, the more you realise what others have accomplished. You can’t exist in a vacuum, you are rooted in time.”(2)

Polke is one of very few artists who are able to work independently of questions of scale, and precisely for this reason he has elevated his constant playing with proportions to one of his favourite creative principles. Unlike the American Pop Art artists, panels and drawings claim an equal place in Polke’s work.
Consciously refusing the traditional medium of the canvas, Polke often resorts to other materials as a base for his paintings. Among the innumerable materials and techniques Polke uses, canvas is not essentially different from, for example, pre-printed decorative fabrics, cardboard or photographs.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Polke returned to painting. With a pared down yet still objective, readable language, Polke develops intuitions adumbrated in his early works on paper, elevating them to a monumental size, as is also the case in the present work. With a manoeuvring manner and graphic technique, Polke repeats motifs derived from advertising, the film industry and comics.

The viewer is encouraged to discover what actually makes a painting: the illustration on its surface, the construction of a physical holster, or the magical combination of basic materials and the artist’s inspiration.
In the present work, well-known linear configurations are transferred into the chromatic texture of a painting, like gigantic movable pieces of scenery. Saturated, opaque lines in the dominant form of a grid or a decorative border create linear coordinates across the space. The theme of the grid, as one of the simplest and most basic graphic forms, is transformed and ironically broken by rising and ebbing contours of symbols that impede the linear structure.
This technique creates an oscillating interplay between positive and negative, of solid ‘skeleton’ and immaterial ‘skin’ stretched taught and transparent between its bones in broad glazes of a tenuous blue and violet colour.
(1) Sigmar Polke quoted in: Sigmar Polke Farbproben- Materialversuche-Probierbilder aus den Jahren 1973-86, Cologne 1999 (2) Sigmar Polke in conversation with Martin Gayford: A Weird Intelligence, in: Modern Painters, winter 2003 p. 82