拍品專文
After a near break from painting for nearly ten years, Polke returned to the medium in 1980. This painting of that same year, perhaps more than most, marks Polke's reawakened interest in the process of making a painting. In the early 1970s, Polke had explored and exposed the inadequacy of the nature of conventionally perceived reality in such works as Alice in Wonderland of 1971 (see lot 42, fig. 2) where through a collage of differing and seemingly unconnected imagery and painterly style he proposed the possiblity of a heightened awareness that he believed he had discovered through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. The 1980s was to find Polke more humourously exploring the very nature of art itself.
In the modern era - what Walter Benjamin famously defined as "the age of mechanical reproduction" - where information and images of all kinds are increasingly at our fingertips, Polke realised that we are as much entrapped by the new technologies as we are liberated by them. By appropriating images and techniques that are evidently borrowed or second-hand and by dislocating them from the environments in which they are normally to be found, Polke seeks to give them new resonance - something other than that which they were originally intended for - and by doing so liberate not just them from the categories of meaning in which they are traditionally placed, but also our own mental perception.
In this Untitled painting, the printed fabric support is a series of swirling forms that are reminiscent of both the marbling techniques of the paper and fabric industries as well as the natural forms to be found in a forest or a flowing mass of kelp. But, like everything in Polke's work, the exact nature of this patterning is not made explicit though there is an evident pun often used by Polke on the parallels between fabric and canvas. Onto this essentially organic background is painted in red stenciled outline the borrowed image of a satyr coupling with an unconcerned naked girl. It is a rendering of an eighteenth century style image from antiquity which presumably explains the crudely outlined vase painted in the middle right of the painting, for the image of the copulating couple is very much of the type that might have appeared on an ancient Greek vase. Surrounding the figures is a cloudy white that is painted over the organic background and bordered by a painted ochre rectangle that closely resembles masking tape. The combined effect of these elements is one that creates the illusion of an unfinished canvas painting within the painting that dislocates our perception and again throws into question the precise nature and purpose of the imagery. Added to this, Polke has stuck onto the surface of the work a number of variously coloured buttons in a seemingly random pattern that in a "join-the-dots" fashion may refer to the artist's "Polke-dot" trademark that he employs frequently in his work.
Polke has stuck at the lower left of the work a number of toggles, that are placed together in a seemingly less than random pattern. These give the work a light-hearted sense of the tangible that is highly reminiscent of the work of Francis Picabia, in particular his 1952 painting Woman with Matches, that again challenges our perceptions by emphasising the physicality of the painting as being very much a tangible object (see illustrations).
Thus this painting is a multi-layered arena of possibility where the more one looks, the more one sees but at each turn nothing certain is revealed. Like the best of Polke's work, this painting exposes the conventions by which we judge what our eyes tell us and by doing so shows us something new.
In the modern era - what Walter Benjamin famously defined as "the age of mechanical reproduction" - where information and images of all kinds are increasingly at our fingertips, Polke realised that we are as much entrapped by the new technologies as we are liberated by them. By appropriating images and techniques that are evidently borrowed or second-hand and by dislocating them from the environments in which they are normally to be found, Polke seeks to give them new resonance - something other than that which they were originally intended for - and by doing so liberate not just them from the categories of meaning in which they are traditionally placed, but also our own mental perception.
In this Untitled painting, the printed fabric support is a series of swirling forms that are reminiscent of both the marbling techniques of the paper and fabric industries as well as the natural forms to be found in a forest or a flowing mass of kelp. But, like everything in Polke's work, the exact nature of this patterning is not made explicit though there is an evident pun often used by Polke on the parallels between fabric and canvas. Onto this essentially organic background is painted in red stenciled outline the borrowed image of a satyr coupling with an unconcerned naked girl. It is a rendering of an eighteenth century style image from antiquity which presumably explains the crudely outlined vase painted in the middle right of the painting, for the image of the copulating couple is very much of the type that might have appeared on an ancient Greek vase. Surrounding the figures is a cloudy white that is painted over the organic background and bordered by a painted ochre rectangle that closely resembles masking tape. The combined effect of these elements is one that creates the illusion of an unfinished canvas painting within the painting that dislocates our perception and again throws into question the precise nature and purpose of the imagery. Added to this, Polke has stuck onto the surface of the work a number of variously coloured buttons in a seemingly random pattern that in a "join-the-dots" fashion may refer to the artist's "Polke-dot" trademark that he employs frequently in his work.
Polke has stuck at the lower left of the work a number of toggles, that are placed together in a seemingly less than random pattern. These give the work a light-hearted sense of the tangible that is highly reminiscent of the work of Francis Picabia, in particular his 1952 painting Woman with Matches, that again challenges our perceptions by emphasising the physicality of the painting as being very much a tangible object (see illustrations).
Thus this painting is a multi-layered arena of possibility where the more one looks, the more one sees but at each turn nothing certain is revealed. Like the best of Polke's work, this painting exposes the conventions by which we judge what our eyes tell us and by doing so shows us something new.