Lot Essay
In the early 1960s, Sigmar Polke, along with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, were inspired by the radical nature of American Pop Art and its departure from any reference to previous art traditions. The young German artists sought to create their own equally individual and original styles which addressed many of the social influences forming West German culture. One such influence was the legend of the American West, made popular on the one hand by the western style films based on the books by Karl May and on the other, by the strong American presence in Germany following the Second World War. This legend assumed even greater importance with the building of the Berlin Wall, which transformed West Germany into a "new frontier" not unlike the American West in the late 19th Century.
Polke's Indianer mit Adler (Indian with Eagle) is without a doubt a product of the psychedelic drug culture of the 1970s. All sense of reality is consciously distorted by the artist's use of garish, fluorescent colors stenciled with spray paint on a luminous tinsel background. The painting clearly makes reference to the visions induced by the hallucinatory drugs so popular in the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Native American became the perfect symbol for the human rights protests of the generation. The psychedelic colors and almost golden background transform the simple portrait into an icon of an era.
In his frequent appropriation of popular images from contemporary culture, Polke displays his interest in Pop Art and his dedication to the Post Modern aesthetic which was starting to develop at the time. The element of appropriation draws attention to and plays with the concept of originality and authorship in art and is in keeping with ideas within Post Modernism and deconstructivism. Polke is consciously disallowing his work to be subsumed within a Modernist aesthetic by mediating his own hand--which was of primary concern within Modernism--through the use of stencil.
One of the trademark features of Polke's paintings since the 1960s is the artist's use of commercial, non-art fabrics instead of canvas. For Indianer mit Adler (Indian with Eagle), he chose a copper colored lurex as his canvas support, a shimmering fabric woven with metallic tinsel. Sean Rainbird writes,
The fabric he used suggested...that even the painter's support belonged as much in the everyday world as in the studio. The idea of a blank surface awaiting the autograph mark is made obsolete by the presence of pre-printed fabrics and finishes. Polke immediately establishes a relationship to something that existed before the picture, while simultaneously diverting that material from its intended function and transforming it into something unique. (S. Rainbird, Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots, Liverpool 1995, pp. 12-15).
Polke's Indianer mit Adler (Indian with Eagle) is without a doubt a product of the psychedelic drug culture of the 1970s. All sense of reality is consciously distorted by the artist's use of garish, fluorescent colors stenciled with spray paint on a luminous tinsel background. The painting clearly makes reference to the visions induced by the hallucinatory drugs so popular in the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Native American became the perfect symbol for the human rights protests of the generation. The psychedelic colors and almost golden background transform the simple portrait into an icon of an era.
In his frequent appropriation of popular images from contemporary culture, Polke displays his interest in Pop Art and his dedication to the Post Modern aesthetic which was starting to develop at the time. The element of appropriation draws attention to and plays with the concept of originality and authorship in art and is in keeping with ideas within Post Modernism and deconstructivism. Polke is consciously disallowing his work to be subsumed within a Modernist aesthetic by mediating his own hand--which was of primary concern within Modernism--through the use of stencil.
One of the trademark features of Polke's paintings since the 1960s is the artist's use of commercial, non-art fabrics instead of canvas. For Indianer mit Adler (Indian with Eagle), he chose a copper colored lurex as his canvas support, a shimmering fabric woven with metallic tinsel. Sean Rainbird writes,
The fabric he used suggested...that even the painter's support belonged as much in the everyday world as in the studio. The idea of a blank surface awaiting the autograph mark is made obsolete by the presence of pre-printed fabrics and finishes. Polke immediately establishes a relationship to something that existed before the picture, while simultaneously diverting that material from its intended function and transforming it into something unique. (S. Rainbird, Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots, Liverpool 1995, pp. 12-15).