Untitled

Ever since his Rasterbilder of the early 1960s Polke's work has exposed the innate artifice of all imagery and demonstrated the strange new realities and layers of reality that seem to emerge when the skin of our perceptual conventions is pealed back. In the early 1970s Polke translated his simultaneous, multi-layered and interdisciplinary style of painting with its cartoon and photographic imagery, pre-fabricated patterns, mixed-media spillages, chance collisions and hallucinogenic clashes of form and color into the medium of photography. In this untitled work, Polke alters the printed surface of the silver gelatin print by adding flecks of colored ink, disturbing the integrity of the photographic image with random spots of color.

Always an alchemist at heart, it is essentially the process of photography--the medium's magical ability to chemically transmute light into imagery--that fascinates Polke and which his photographs both demonstrate and play with. Never one to present one single view or conventional image where many will do, Polke revels in the fluidity and accident of photography in much the same way as he does with the equally fluid and versatile medium of paint.