(Oels/Lower Silesia 1942 - 2010 Cologne)
Hurra, 3Richtinge!, 1972, signed on the drawing, collage of one photograph, 43 lottery tickets and one drawing on paper, 67 x 64 cm, framed

Provenance:
Arturo Schwarz Collection, Milan
Studio d’Arte Martini, Brescia, 20 March 2016, lot. 140
European Private Collection

Sigmar Polke’s Hurra, 3Richtige!, through an amalgamation of related elements executed in distinct media, typifies the genre of critical anarchy that he expressed most centrally in his works on paper from the mid-1960s to 1970s. Hurra, 3Richtige! embodies the corresponding direction that Polke took forward, away from broad anchors of German art history, and towards a more renegade, yet still socially involved approach, that drew from his radical Fluxus mentor in Düsseldorf, Joseph Beuys.

This plane, comprised of 43 lottery tickets, one Informel ballpoint drawing, a photograph of an eveningwear-adorned, champagne-drinking couple, and a page with text translating to “Hooray, 3Correct!” moreover utilises Neo-Dada comedy and material strategy, in order to comment on postwar demagogies of democracy in Germany.

The “promised gifts” of capitalism, namely the sort of luxuries enjoyed by Polke’s grinning pair in his photograph, were, during the progression of his early life, particularly glorified by figures of national authority, in addition to the growing popular press. Juxtaposing his two Bacchic subjects with humorous ink lines on a lower notebook page that depict surreal characters with eyesight paths drawn directed to money, Polke then unifies the man and woman with the 43 lottery tickets from a distance. It is as if the Picabia-like faces are emphasising an “answer” to the discussed unachievable, economic goals set forth by new democratic government: gambling.

These atypically constructed dynamics of meaning and message also correspond to the initial intended environment for this lot. Its composition was originally designated for a wooden cabinet entitled En Bloc, which features 14 drawers filled with similarly anarchic objects, created not only by Polke, but also by fellow artists including Beuys, Imi Knoebel, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Blinky Palermo, and others. The production of the structure, a version of which is in the MoMA collection, was organised by celebrated Berlin curator René Block, himself a proponent of a movement known as Capitalist Realism.