(Oels/Lower Silesia 1942–2010 Cologne)
Untitled, signed, dated and inscribed on the overlap S. Polke 86 III, pigment, lacquer on nettle cloth, 50 x 40 cm, framed, (PS)

Watch Video: Contemporary Art | November 2015 | Austrian and German Artists

The present work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné by The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne.

Provenance:
Private Collection, Europe since 1990

‘I apply paint and lacquer, and on the canvas they decide where they want to go. […]

The picture determines its own fate, follows its own path in a way perhaps best described as dancing tables in spiritualist sessions […].’
Sigmar Polke (quote according to Groot/Heynen 1983, p. 276, in: Martin Hentschel, Die Ordnung des Heterogenen. Sigmar Polkes Werk bis 1986, Bochum 1991, p. 351)

‘I am intrinsically interested in processes themselves. The actual picture is not really necessary. It is the unpredictability that truly captivates.’
Sigmar Polke (Erhard Klein, Farbproben – Materialversuche – Probierbilder aus den Jahren 1973-1986, Cologne 1998)

In the extensive oeuvre of Sigmar Polke, the so-called ‘slopped paintings’, experiments in colour and ‘experimental paintings’ in which the artist immersed himself from the start of the nineteen-seventies represent the abstract moment in which calculated chaos is elevated to the status of formal principle.
In these pieces, which like this work remain untitled, Sigmar Polke pours synthetic polymer paint on to a muslin base, which he turns at different speeds this way and that, causing the colourful streams to criss-cross the fabric, where they form patterns and figures as they solidify in pools, rivulets, and streaks. The conscious involvement of happenstance in the emergence of the picture largely prevents any form of figurative interference with the flow of paint, lending the imagery an openness in which primarily the processual nature of how the picture comes into being is placed on display. These barely controllable streams of colour inject the imagery of the pieces with mystery and ambiguity: the abstract results involuntarily engender associations with figurative motifs while remaining altogether indefinable. Polke claims mainly to be interested in the ‘alternation between the perceptible and imperceptible qualities of the motifs, the indecision and doubtfulness of the situation, the lack of resolution.’ The metamorphosic nature of this body of work is as intangible as the flowing forms that appear in the artworks of Louis Morris, Paul Jenkins, or Jackson Pollock, yet Sigmar Polke possesses even greater stringency in his depiction of the aesthetic components of coincidence. An ‘alchemist’ among painters, Polke made history with his abstract works, the ‘paint and slopped paintings’, by using playful, technically unsophisticated methods to encourage onlookers to delve into the realm of fantasy – a realm where a definite interpretation doesn´t always exist.

See: Anita Shah, Die Dinge sehen wie sie sind. Zu Sigmar Polkes malerischem Werk seit 1981, Weimar 2002.

See: Götz Adriani (ed.), Polke – Eine Retrospektive. Die Sammlungen Frieder Burda, Josef Froehlich, Reiner Speck, Ostfildern 2007.