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Lot Essay
'I love dots. With many dots I am married. I want all dots to be happy. The dots are my brothers. I am also a dot. Earlier we used to play together, today everybody goes their own way. We only meet now at family gatherings and ask: how are you?'
--Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke is today regarded as one of the world's leading Contemporary artists. From his early Pop Art pictures of the 1960s to his alchemical experiments with toxic substances in the 1980s, he has explored a multiplicity of dazzling signature styles and unconventional materials. He has constantly challenged accepted traditions, while demonstrating that painting is still the most vital medium with which to investigate contemporary experience. Zwei Frauen belongs to Polke's rare series of dot-paintings (Rasterbild), which investigates the theme of mass-market consumerism and its influence on our visual consciousness.
Born in East Germany, Sigmar Polke was twelve years old when he escaped to West Berlin in 1953. His early upbringing under Communist rule fuelled him with a wry cynicism and politicized detachment, made even more pronounced in the face of the extreme consumerism that characterized the American-influenced culture he now encountered in the West. Enrolling into the Dsseldorf Art Academy, he befriended fellow student Gerhard Richter and together with Konrad Fischer-Lueg, they founded a German version of Pop Art, which they called Capitalist Realism as a retaliation against the Social Realist paintings favored by the Communist State.
Mirroring the preoccupations of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichenstein, the Capital Realists wished to introduce the dynamics of contemporary life back into painting. They borrowed their imagery from the mass media world of advertising and fashion, and imitated the visual language of mass reproduction in order to imbue their art with a gutsy immediacy and directness. While Richter faithfully copied black and white photographs from magazines, Polke stayed closer to American Pop by using the benday-dot system of commercial printing to reproduce onto canvas the images he found in newspapers.
As with Lichenstein's enlarged comic-strip dramas, Polke's dot-paintings stimulate the mechanics of the printing process through the manual application of paint in grids of minute dots. But whereas Lichenstein's precise rendering of the magnified benday-dots creates a static and iconic image, Polke purposely combines dots of different scale and color in paintings such as Zwei Frauen in order to recreate the grainy blur of the newsprint. Polke's dots have destabilized the original media image of these two glamorous fashion models and the optical-haziness helps to create a psychological distance between the viewer and the women, whose features have become an anonymous pattern of dots.
Warhol and Lichenstein's paintings glorified the products and celebrities of the super-consumer culture of the 1960s. Zwei Frauen shows Polke taking a more critical and cynical stance. As the author Robert Hughes has written, Capitalist Realism 'was about objects of desire, seen from a distance.' These fur-lined and leather-booted sirens, standing provocatively in the glare of the catwalk spotlight, appear out of focus like unattainable dreams, just as they would have been to the impoverished and downtrodden people in the country of Polke's birth.
--Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke is today regarded as one of the world's leading Contemporary artists. From his early Pop Art pictures of the 1960s to his alchemical experiments with toxic substances in the 1980s, he has explored a multiplicity of dazzling signature styles and unconventional materials. He has constantly challenged accepted traditions, while demonstrating that painting is still the most vital medium with which to investigate contemporary experience. Zwei Frauen belongs to Polke's rare series of dot-paintings (Rasterbild), which investigates the theme of mass-market consumerism and its influence on our visual consciousness.
Born in East Germany, Sigmar Polke was twelve years old when he escaped to West Berlin in 1953. His early upbringing under Communist rule fuelled him with a wry cynicism and politicized detachment, made even more pronounced in the face of the extreme consumerism that characterized the American-influenced culture he now encountered in the West. Enrolling into the Dsseldorf Art Academy, he befriended fellow student Gerhard Richter and together with Konrad Fischer-Lueg, they founded a German version of Pop Art, which they called Capitalist Realism as a retaliation against the Social Realist paintings favored by the Communist State.
Mirroring the preoccupations of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichenstein, the Capital Realists wished to introduce the dynamics of contemporary life back into painting. They borrowed their imagery from the mass media world of advertising and fashion, and imitated the visual language of mass reproduction in order to imbue their art with a gutsy immediacy and directness. While Richter faithfully copied black and white photographs from magazines, Polke stayed closer to American Pop by using the benday-dot system of commercial printing to reproduce onto canvas the images he found in newspapers.
As with Lichenstein's enlarged comic-strip dramas, Polke's dot-paintings stimulate the mechanics of the printing process through the manual application of paint in grids of minute dots. But whereas Lichenstein's precise rendering of the magnified benday-dots creates a static and iconic image, Polke purposely combines dots of different scale and color in paintings such as Zwei Frauen in order to recreate the grainy blur of the newsprint. Polke's dots have destabilized the original media image of these two glamorous fashion models and the optical-haziness helps to create a psychological distance between the viewer and the women, whose features have become an anonymous pattern of dots.
Warhol and Lichenstein's paintings glorified the products and celebrities of the super-consumer culture of the 1960s. Zwei Frauen shows Polke taking a more critical and cynical stance. As the author Robert Hughes has written, Capitalist Realism 'was about objects of desire, seen from a distance.' These fur-lined and leather-booted sirens, standing provocatively in the glare of the catwalk spotlight, appear out of focus like unattainable dreams, just as they would have been to the impoverished and downtrodden people in the country of Polke's birth.