拍品專文
In the early 1970s, Sigmar 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 Audacia. In these paintings, there is no visual hierarchy. Nor is there a beginning, an end, or a recognizable subject. The image is deconstructed and allowed to float, without definition, amongst 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 images as well as that of mixing the materials with which he paints them.
With this in mind, it is perhaps of special interest that Polke's most sumptuously poetic paintings, ostensibly in the tradition of sublime landscapes, are actually more portrait-like examinations of anxious weather conditions. In paintings such as those in the negative value series of 1982, or Audacia (1986), in which turbulent climactic events seem to emanate from the outline of a human mind, Polke appears to be saying that the climate is roiling. And there's no sled in sight. (L. Liebman, Warhol/Beuys/Polke, Milwaukee 1987, p. 101)
Audacia is a part of a series of eight works painted in 1986 that are from a series called Durerschleifen. The title translates as "Durer's loops" and pays homage to a woodcut called The Great Triumphal Chariot of Maximillian I created by Albrecht Dürer, the greatest of all German print makers. The woodcut was commissioned by the Emperor Maximillian I in 1522 and the eight virtues (Acrimonia, Audacia, Alacritas, Experientia, Providentia, Ratio, Velocitas, and Virilitas) correspond to the eight plates of the woodcut. Bice Curiger described these works in wonderful detail:
The Schleifen are the very quintessence of the tension, grace, and musicality that can flow out of the movement of a hand (Durer's hand). Polke's hand traces the movement of these lines, which celebrate themselves in the name of certain virtues, in enlarged versions painted on those Polke backgrounds that seem to gaze into outer space. It is like writing before writing, like writing without the coercion of transport, without a solid background, writing in unified harmony with the infinite flow of time, writing perhaps in a background (graphite) that is the ashes of the stars' out of which, recent findings of physics tell us, we have been formed. (B. Curiger, Sigmar Polke, Amsterdam 1992, p. 60)
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 images as well as that of mixing the materials with which he paints them.
With this in mind, it is perhaps of special interest that Polke's most sumptuously poetic paintings, ostensibly in the tradition of sublime landscapes, are actually more portrait-like examinations of anxious weather conditions. In paintings such as those in the negative value series of 1982, or Audacia (1986), in which turbulent climactic events seem to emanate from the outline of a human mind, Polke appears to be saying that the climate is roiling. And there's no sled in sight. (L. Liebman, Warhol/Beuys/Polke, Milwaukee 1987, p. 101)
Audacia is a part of a series of eight works painted in 1986 that are from a series called Durerschleifen. The title translates as "Durer's loops" and pays homage to a woodcut called The Great Triumphal Chariot of Maximillian I created by Albrecht Dürer, the greatest of all German print makers. The woodcut was commissioned by the Emperor Maximillian I in 1522 and the eight virtues (Acrimonia, Audacia, Alacritas, Experientia, Providentia, Ratio, Velocitas, and Virilitas) correspond to the eight plates of the woodcut. Bice Curiger described these works in wonderful detail:
The Schleifen are the very quintessence of the tension, grace, and musicality that can flow out of the movement of a hand (Durer's hand). Polke's hand traces the movement of these lines, which celebrate themselves in the name of certain virtues, in enlarged versions painted on those Polke backgrounds that seem to gaze into outer space. It is like writing before writing, like writing without the coercion of transport, without a solid background, writing in unified harmony with the infinite flow of time, writing perhaps in a background (graphite) that is the ashes of the stars' out of which, recent findings of physics tell us, we have been formed. (B. Curiger, Sigmar Polke, Amsterdam 1992, p. 60)