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SIGMAR POLKE (b. 1941) MIT KLEINEN SCHWARZEN QUADRATEN (WITH SMALL BLACK SQUARES) dispersion on b...

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SIGMAR POLKE (b. 1941) MIT KLEINEN SCHWARZEN QUADRATEN (WITH SMALL BLACK SQUARES) dispersion on b...
SIGMAR POLKE
(b. 1941)
MIT KLEINEN SCHWARZEN QUADRATEN
(WITH SMALL BLACK SQUARES)
dispersion on beaver cloth
59 x 50 3/8 in. (150 x 128 cm)
executed in 1968 <p>PROVENANCE
Galerie Rene Block, BERLIN
exhibited
BONN, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; BERLIN, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart and Saatliche Museen zu Berlin, SIGMAR POLKE. DIE DREI LÜGEN DER MALEREI, June 7, 1997-February 15, 1998, p. 114 (illustrated)
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen and Bonn Städtisches Kunstmuseum, SIGMAR POLKE, December 18, 1983-March 25, 1984, no. 19 (illustrated)
Literature
B.H.D. Bulloch, SIGMAR POLKE: BILDER, TÜCHER, OBJECTE, WERKAUSWAHL 1962-1971, COLOGNE, 1976, p. 73, pl. 103 (illustrated)
Characterized by irony and clever wit, Sigmar Polke has established himself as one of the greatest artists of historical epic and allegory, continually reinventing himself along the way. Alluding to literature, art history, and history in general, Polke experiments and provokes with new materials. Polke combines completely different pictorial contents, establishing patterns of meaning that appear absurd at first glance but often reveal more profound relationships.
While studying painting at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf throughout the 1960s, Sigmar Polke digested the various exponents of contemporary American art that flooded postwar West Germany. In the sixties, Polke embraced a whole range of motifs in his visual world that seem like a collection of finds from reconnaissance missions in petit bourgeois, German living rooms. After working in a Pop vein for several years, Polke adopted an abstract style and produced his seminal painting MIT KLEINEN SCHWARZEN QUADRATEN in 1968. In this painting, Polke paints black squares over a checkered fabric. In their own way, these painted brushstrokes become one with the pattern of the fabric, thus the painting can also be read as a parody of abstract painting. Polke brings yet another level of meaning into the images when he uses inexpensive printed decorative fabrics as ground for his paintings instead of the customary white canvas. Paradoxically, this allows the viewer greater opportunity to reflect upon the painting act itself. Moreover, that Polke frequently chooses fabrics with grid patterns or decorative repeats may be considered a kind of scoffing at modernism's "grid." The painting also broaches the postmodern questions and issues of authorship and originality. "It may be argued that throughout Polke's career, the whole notion of identity, as of authorship, is perpetually undermined... This objective is never so evident as in Polke's work from the sixties, when he began to formulate his vision and to elaborate a counter-canonical artistic voice. These works participate in a complex master strategy that was and is to regenerate the language and meaning of Western artistic experience" (M. Rowell, SIGMAR POLKE, NEW YORK, 1999, p. 10).
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