In the early seventies, Polke began to make paintings in which figural motifs were superimposed on one another over printed fabrics. Although it never constituted a signature style, it does anticipate works to follow, such as the Untitled triptych. In these paintings, there is no visual hierarchy. There is no beginning, no end, nor a recognizable subject. The image is deconstructed and allowed to float, without definition, throughout other images gleaned from history, art history, metaphysics, popular culture, religion and politics.

Polke often "constructs" images from disparate sources, using disparate materials such as blankets, commercially printed fabrics, glass, scrim, resins and minerals. He is interested in the chance possibility of mixing images as well as that of mixing the materials with which he paints them.

The Untitled triptych in the Elliott collection clearly alludes to the trompe l'oeil frescoes painted by Francisco Goya in the church of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid in 1798. Goya's brilliant group of Madrilenians witnessing the miracle of St. Anthony of Padua with all the concentration of a seance is palely relected in Polke's paintings. The painting, made primarily with synthetic resins mixed with strange inks (mostly sulphurous yellow and purple) that change color in response to changes in light and temperature, at first appears abstract. However, slowly one begins to perceive the figures that inhabit the fringes of each panel. Goya, for all his contacts with the Enlightenment, was an artist of the irrational, of the witch's sabbath, of the horror and fright of the Black Paintings. Polke sees in him a kindred spirit and one who came to share his secrets with him...More recently he has aspired to a mysticism and elusive sublimity that seem to relate to late Turner or the black magic world of Goya (N. Rosenthal,"Expanding the Possibilities for Painting: Baselitz, Polke, Kiefer," Affinities and Intuitions, The Gerald S. Elliott Collection of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1990, p. 147).