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Lot Essay
Seestück ("Seascape") is one of the first transparency paintings that Polke made in the early 1980s. Painted in a variety of media on transparent nylon, the image and feel of the painting alters according to the light conditions under which it is hung. This transmutability in the nature of its surface and image is part of the artist's mercurial aesthetic and deliberately mirrors the hermetic practice of alchemy and its search for the hidden laws behind the transmutability of all matter.
After a periodic break from painting in the 1970s, in the early 1980s, Polke began to experiment with a wide variety of paints and materials in order to create an art of constant transmutation. Instead of canvas he used a variety of commercially produced printed fabrics as a substitute, and turned to many ancient, obscure and sometimes illegal and poisonous pigments in the search for materials that would constantly evolve and change their appearance over time.
Through the use of such a constantly shifting variety of media and of materials that were themselves transmutating, Polke sought to assert the living quality of his art and to keep his paintings literally alive. For the 1986 Venice Biennale, he painted the walls of the German pavilion with a series of pigments highly susceptible to humidity and damp. In the moist climate of the Venetian lagoons, the result was an extremely fragile and volatile painted fresco that changed colour and texture almost by the hour. With the transparency paintings, through the use of nylon as a support, and by painting with the translucent inks used in silkscreening, Polke was able to create paintings with the same degree of transmutability. Paintings that themselves respond to the slightest change in the light.
Seestück is in many respects a typical romantic seascape in the long-running Northern Romantic tradition that began with Casper David Friedrich and which still continues to permeate much contemporary German art. Presenting the ocean as an infinite expanse overlooked by three figures at the keyside, Seestück recalls such romantic vistas as Friedrich's Moonrise by the Sea of 1822 . Layered with a variety of transluscent washes of colour that range from purple to yellow, and which include the artist's trademark 'raster' or Polke-dots, the sea and the sky are rendered as an astral plane of mystery - the mystic cosmos of the mind that informs so much of Polke's art. Hollowed out of this mystic expanse of the universe as if they were passing spaceships, are the pale reflected silhouettes of two sailing ships which mysteriously appear and disappear according to way light falls on the painting. In order to assert that this seemingly infinite purple expanse is indeed a mystic dimension, the silhouette of each ship is reflected in upon itself and in ways that deliberately undermine the pictorial logic of the picture. Through such simple subversions and, in this case highly traditional means of representation, Polke attempts to introduce the viewer to a mystical understanding of life.
After a periodic break from painting in the 1970s, in the early 1980s, Polke began to experiment with a wide variety of paints and materials in order to create an art of constant transmutation. Instead of canvas he used a variety of commercially produced printed fabrics as a substitute, and turned to many ancient, obscure and sometimes illegal and poisonous pigments in the search for materials that would constantly evolve and change their appearance over time.
Through the use of such a constantly shifting variety of media and of materials that were themselves transmutating, Polke sought to assert the living quality of his art and to keep his paintings literally alive. For the 1986 Venice Biennale, he painted the walls of the German pavilion with a series of pigments highly susceptible to humidity and damp. In the moist climate of the Venetian lagoons, the result was an extremely fragile and volatile painted fresco that changed colour and texture almost by the hour. With the transparency paintings, through the use of nylon as a support, and by painting with the translucent inks used in silkscreening, Polke was able to create paintings with the same degree of transmutability. Paintings that themselves respond to the slightest change in the light.
Seestück is in many respects a typical romantic seascape in the long-running Northern Romantic tradition that began with Casper David Friedrich and which still continues to permeate much contemporary German art. Presenting the ocean as an infinite expanse overlooked by three figures at the keyside, Seestück recalls such romantic vistas as Friedrich's Moonrise by the Sea of 1822 . Layered with a variety of transluscent washes of colour that range from purple to yellow, and which include the artist's trademark 'raster' or Polke-dots, the sea and the sky are rendered as an astral plane of mystery - the mystic cosmos of the mind that informs so much of Polke's art. Hollowed out of this mystic expanse of the universe as if they were passing spaceships, are the pale reflected silhouettes of two sailing ships which mysteriously appear and disappear according to way light falls on the painting. In order to assert that this seemingly infinite purple expanse is indeed a mystic dimension, the silhouette of each ship is reflected in upon itself and in ways that deliberately undermine the pictorial logic of the picture. Through such simple subversions and, in this case highly traditional means of representation, Polke attempts to introduce the viewer to a mystical understanding of life.