Nine Solutions for Polke

A cascade of brown and white numbers surge across Suzanne McClelland’s Nine Solutions for Polke, 2013. Spatters of white flicker across the painting’s surface as a torrent of data collapses under the weight of undulating vortices and chutes. Extensive research informs McClelland’s works, and her titles often allude to real figures and events; Nine Solutions for Polke refers to the artist Sigmar Polke, whose vibrant compositions fused temporalities and imagery to create hypnotic refractions of the contemporary world. McClelland’s ciphers are both a translation of Polke’s unorthodox approach and a poetics of information. In integers, the artist sees a ‘narrative and visual power’ which can be harnessed to reposition how images address the world.