Lot Essay
Sigmar Polke, born in East Germany, escaped to West Berlin in 1953 at the age of twelve. He moved to Düsseldorf in 1959 where he apprenticed as a glass painter but eventually enrolled at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he met Gerhard Richter and studied with Joseph Beuys.
In 1963, Polke, Richter, and Konrad Lueg (Konrad Fischer) staged an action/installation under the title Capitalist Realism in the Berges Furniture Store in Düsseldorf. Hanging their own works among furniture and appliances from the store, they sat in model rooms with furniture displayed on white bases while dance music played and everyone was offered a glass of beer. Capitalist Realism, like American Pop,
...was about objects of desire, seen from a distance. The things Polke started piling into his paintings--cake, liverwurst, plastic tubs, etc.--were excruciatingly hackneyed, with none of the gloss and glamour of American Pop, but they also had a muffled political dimension...they were precisely what the Germany he had left beind did not have; and the split between East and West, for ordinary Germans, lay along the ruts of consumption rather than the peaks of rhetoric (R. Hughes, "Germany's Ironic Trickster," Time, December 1991, p. 80).
Polke's early paintings were a response to American Pop, from his paintings of common objects to the Rasterbild (screen paintings), such as the portrait of Helmut Klinker, which acknowledged Lichtenstein's use of Benday dots. However, Polke was well aware of the technique and use of Benday dots prior to the advent of Pop Art. Benday dots were the discovery of a German physician and optician, Heinrich W. Dove (1803-1879), and the process had influenced earlier 20th century artists such as Seurat and Man Ray. Unlike Lichtenstein's, Polke's application of Benday dots was based on a complicated manual transfer process that translates every particle of the projection onto the whole of the picture. Despite this, the Raster paintings retain a hand-made quality and resonance which defy their look of mechanical reproduction.
The subject matter of the Raster paintings was borrowed from found images in newspapers, magazines, travel brochures, and very often portraits of friends, dealers, and patrons. Helmut Klinker, a collector, was an early supporter and close friend of Polke's and his portrait is a superb example of Polke's early screen paintings. It is one of the few that is transcribed entirely by hand; in the mid-sixties Polke began to use a less labor intensive mechanical stencil with a spray gun to achieve the effect of Benday dots. The paint is applied in dense inky dots which create an abstract, painterly surface. Polke's portraits recall the early silkscreen portraits by Andy Warhol that portray celebrities, art dealers, politicians, and most-wanted men in an ironic, dead-pan manner.
Resolutely ordinary in their subjects, Polke's paintings from the mid-1960s are instantaneously legible, completely immediate, and uninvolved with the rituals and conventions of the world of art. They hit our consciousness directly, like a small bullet from a silenced gun. In this respect Polke's work--more than the American Pop artists of these years--marks the most complete break with the abstract expressionism that had preceded it, and it reflects most clearly his direct relationship to life as we actually experience it (J. Caldwell, Sigmar Polke, San Francisco 1990, p. 10).
In 1963, Polke, Richter, and Konrad Lueg (Konrad Fischer) staged an action/installation under the title Capitalist Realism in the Berges Furniture Store in Düsseldorf. Hanging their own works among furniture and appliances from the store, they sat in model rooms with furniture displayed on white bases while dance music played and everyone was offered a glass of beer. Capitalist Realism, like American Pop,
...was about objects of desire, seen from a distance. The things Polke started piling into his paintings--cake, liverwurst, plastic tubs, etc.--were excruciatingly hackneyed, with none of the gloss and glamour of American Pop, but they also had a muffled political dimension...they were precisely what the Germany he had left beind did not have; and the split between East and West, for ordinary Germans, lay along the ruts of consumption rather than the peaks of rhetoric (R. Hughes, "Germany's Ironic Trickster," Time, December 1991, p. 80).
Polke's early paintings were a response to American Pop, from his paintings of common objects to the Rasterbild (screen paintings), such as the portrait of Helmut Klinker, which acknowledged Lichtenstein's use of Benday dots. However, Polke was well aware of the technique and use of Benday dots prior to the advent of Pop Art. Benday dots were the discovery of a German physician and optician, Heinrich W. Dove (1803-1879), and the process had influenced earlier 20th century artists such as Seurat and Man Ray. Unlike Lichtenstein's, Polke's application of Benday dots was based on a complicated manual transfer process that translates every particle of the projection onto the whole of the picture. Despite this, the Raster paintings retain a hand-made quality and resonance which defy their look of mechanical reproduction.
The subject matter of the Raster paintings was borrowed from found images in newspapers, magazines, travel brochures, and very often portraits of friends, dealers, and patrons. Helmut Klinker, a collector, was an early supporter and close friend of Polke's and his portrait is a superb example of Polke's early screen paintings. It is one of the few that is transcribed entirely by hand; in the mid-sixties Polke began to use a less labor intensive mechanical stencil with a spray gun to achieve the effect of Benday dots. The paint is applied in dense inky dots which create an abstract, painterly surface. Polke's portraits recall the early silkscreen portraits by Andy Warhol that portray celebrities, art dealers, politicians, and most-wanted men in an ironic, dead-pan manner.
Resolutely ordinary in their subjects, Polke's paintings from the mid-1960s are instantaneously legible, completely immediate, and uninvolved with the rituals and conventions of the world of art. They hit our consciousness directly, like a small bullet from a silenced gun. In this respect Polke's work--more than the American Pop artists of these years--marks the most complete break with the abstract expressionism that had preceded it, and it reflects most clearly his direct relationship to life as we actually experience it (J. Caldwell, Sigmar Polke, San Francisco 1990, p. 10).