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Lot Essay
Monopoli is the most comprehensive and complex of a series of twenty-two paintings based on the subject of the French Revolution that Polke made between 1988 and 1989. This exceptional series of works was produced by the artist on his own initiative to coincide with the bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989 and was first exhibited in a sequence of two exhibitions at the Crousel-Robelin Bama Gallery in Paris in 1989 and 1990. Together all twenty-two paintings were subsequently re-exhibited together at the Musée de la Revolution Francaise, Vizille, in 2001.
Listed as the nineteenth painting in the series, Monopoli presents a composite of many of the themes of the paintings preceding it. Mixing printed fabric images of gambling and spinning roulette wheels with horrifying reproductions of prints from the period detailing the chaos and violence of the years of the Terror, the painting powerfully conveys a crazy atmosphere of things spiralling out of control.
Layered image over image and pattern over pattern, the intensity of imagery in this painting is quite breathtaking. In his adopting of the subject of Revolution Polke evidently did not wish to approximate a historical rendering of this vast subject and period of profound, turbulent and radical change. Rather, he has sought through his art to investigate how the images and the meanings of the images from this period resonate today. Throughout the series of twenty-two pictures, but most notably in Monopoli, the range and mix of imagery from both the revolutionary period and of today is constantly intermingled. In Monopoli with its cascade of Revolutionary prints tumbling through the centre of the picture over its splashed white-painted background, a hallucinatory sense, (bolstered by the psychedelic magic mushroom wallpaper), of the artifice of time and of the Revolution as a gruesome slide-show of history is generated. As in much of Polke's work there appears to be a comment here on the ephemeral nature of all momentous events while at the same time the horrific or epic nature of much of the imagery and the pictorial language of its representation retells the reality of its own story. In this way a conflict of interest is set up within the picture that both exposes and questions the nature of all imagery and the way in which it carries and conveys meaning.
Listed as the nineteenth painting in the series, Monopoli presents a composite of many of the themes of the paintings preceding it. Mixing printed fabric images of gambling and spinning roulette wheels with horrifying reproductions of prints from the period detailing the chaos and violence of the years of the Terror, the painting powerfully conveys a crazy atmosphere of things spiralling out of control.
Layered image over image and pattern over pattern, the intensity of imagery in this painting is quite breathtaking. In his adopting of the subject of Revolution Polke evidently did not wish to approximate a historical rendering of this vast subject and period of profound, turbulent and radical change. Rather, he has sought through his art to investigate how the images and the meanings of the images from this period resonate today. Throughout the series of twenty-two pictures, but most notably in Monopoli, the range and mix of imagery from both the revolutionary period and of today is constantly intermingled. In Monopoli with its cascade of Revolutionary prints tumbling through the centre of the picture over its splashed white-painted background, a hallucinatory sense, (bolstered by the psychedelic magic mushroom wallpaper), of the artifice of time and of the Revolution as a gruesome slide-show of history is generated. As in much of Polke's work there appears to be a comment here on the ephemeral nature of all momentous events while at the same time the horrific or epic nature of much of the imagery and the pictorial language of its representation retells the reality of its own story. In this way a conflict of interest is set up within the picture that both exposes and questions the nature of all imagery and the way in which it carries and conveys meaning.