Visual Arts

Playing with materials and content, Sigmar Polke gave our present an ironic grilling as inexorable as it was light-footed.

In view of the sudden death of Sigmar Polke on June 10, 2010, all visitors to ART Basel contemplated his “Laterna Magica” with silent pensiveness. The choice of a work to fulfill the unexpected function of representing his legacy could not have been more suggestive, for this series of pictures from 1990 contains all those qualities that make Polke’s work singular and unmistakable: using a wide variety of pictorial sources, he ingeniously blends fairy tales, myths, history and the present into an acute and overlapping new reality that is difficult to decipher.

The cunning alchemist

Through the techniques that produce them, the contents take on versatile statements. As the alchemist here coats transparent polyester fabric with paint on both sides, so he experimented adventurously and cunningly with paint and canvas, with simple, non-artistic materials and novel methods. He labored with resin, shellac, with silver nitrate and emulsion paints; he daubed and blobbed, rastered, copied, collaged and montaged. Sucked into the event of the picture, the viewer involuntarily re-enacts how the painter simultaneously reflected on the production of images and the beginnings of the moving image, invalidated the rejection of the power of the image with doubt-arousing counter- proofs, which he also carried further (“The Three Lies of Painting” [Die drei Lügen der Malerei, 1994]).

The precise analyst

Using the canvas as a transparent membrane allows the frame to become visible as a construct for the process of painting as for the projection of illusionist worlds. Polke helps himself to the mass media so as at the same time to question bluntly the trivial concoction. He was an inventive magician, a precise analyst and a sceptical commentator. Shy of publicity, he pursued unnoticed in his witches’ kitchen a boundlessly radiating game with materials and content, through which he gave our present an ironic grilling as inexorable as it was light-footed.

The prizewinner

Born in Oels in Lower Saxony, he fled with his family in 1945 to Thuringia and then in 1953 from East Germany, via West Berlin, to Düsseldorf. That before his studies there at the Academy of Art (1961–67) he absolved an apprenticeship as a glass-painter proved itself particularly useful in his last major public commission, the glass and agate window series for the Great Minster in Zurich. From 1977 to 1991, Polke held a professorship at the College of the Fine Arts in Hamburg, participated many times in the documenta, and exhibited at the 1986 German Pavilion in Venice, where he was awarded the grand prize for painting; there followed further awards such as the Kaiserring in Goslar (2000), the Rubens Prize in Siegen (2007), and this year the Swiss Roswitha Haftmann Prize.

In 1963, together with Gerhard Richter, Konrad Fischer-Lueg and Manfred Kuttner, he invented “capitalist realism”. With this provocative characterization, he and his former fellow students could pull the leg of not only socialist realism and American abstract art but also the excesses of the capitalist “Economic Miracle”.

“Polke, you must become a palm”

Polke caused a stir with his pop art-like raster method with which he inflated the tiny pixels of print media into hand-colored dots and so to some extent produced a contemporary visual unit by means of fragmentation. He exchanged the canvas for the patterned tablecloth and wool blanket, covering these unusual backgrounds with elegant and stylized stereotypes of middle-class longing. Irony goes hand in hand with self-irony in his work, and this not only when he ascribed the highest creativity to the germinating potato or when, in a series drawings, photographs and prints of palm trees, he mixed himself amongst the variants of palm trees such as the measuring-stick palm, the bread palm and the cotton-wool palm: “Polke, you must become a palm, a voice said to me”.

Graphic prints, particularly silk-screens, and photography were also not immune to Polke’s point-blank attempts to exhaust their many varieties. The photographs, which largely erase their subjects, form an inspiring and communicative breeding ground for his entire work. And the scope of his work is bewilderingly broad. It inextricably mixes high and low culture, science and art, politics and everyday life; this is a trademark that alone the heterogeneous titles illustrate: “Radioactive Fallout” (Radioaktiver Abfall, 1992), “Anyone Could Come Along” (Da könnte ja jeder kommen, 1982), “Russian Uniform” (Russische Uniform,1994), “Rococo” (Rokoko,1994), “Angler” (1988), “Towels” (Handtücher,1994) and “Higher Beings Command: Paint the Right Upper Corner Black!” (Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen!).

Higher beings command

With this last system-critical picture of 1969, Polke was rubbing less against the constructivists than he was rejecting the cult of genius and attempting to escape from the art market. In this sense then his fairly dangerous experiments with colorants were owing not to Faustian hubristic reveries but rather to an irrepressible curiosity that explored the boundaries of painting and thereby made use of the achievements of science and technology. Now “higher beings” have put an end to the inventive activity of Sigmar Polke.