LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART II  / 

152

SIGMAR POLKE (German, b. 1941) UNTITLED (INDIAN SERIES) each signed

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SIGMAR POLKE (German, b. 1941) UNTITLED (INDIAN SERIES) each signed
SIGMAR POLKE (German, b. 1941) UNTITLED (INDIAN SERIES) each signed "S. Polke" in blue ink on verso three gelatin silver prints (negatives) hinged to elevated boards that are mounted on additional boards each: 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 in. (21 x 29.5 cm) circa 1978 from the INDIAN SERIES PROVENANCE David Zwirner Gallery, NEW YORK Private Collection, NEW YORK Throughout the 1970s, Sigmar Polke pushed his photography to the brink of coherence and legibility. Dispensing with most established rules of photographic production, the artist subjected his negatives and prints to countless forms of physical and chemical manipulation. While the end results were often beyond his control, Polke's reckless experimentation ultimately yielded unprecedented visual effects. As Bice Curiger has claimed, "Polke transgresses many of the rules of classic photography. He would appear to be interested in opposites such as in or out of focus, well or badly lit, correctly or under- or over-exposed - not as values in themselves, but for their formal possibilities: scratches on the negative, splashes of photographic chemicals, repeatedly interrupting or overdoing the process of development and all sorts of other 'outrageous' acts all add up to a different way of reading the medium" (Bice Curiger, "On Sigmar Polke's Photo-Pieces," SIGMAR POLKE: BACK TO POSTMODERNITY, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996, p. 143). Polke based the present series on ethnographic photographs of Native Americans. After re-photographing these pre-existing images, the artist treated the negatives to variable exposure times and developed them with an inconsistent application of photochemicals. Despite, or perhaps as a consequence of, the unpredictability of these processes, the final images achieve a haunting beauty. In some of the prints, one clearly discerns the silver silhouettes of human figures and palm fronds. In others, the subjects are less clear, and float through an aqueous space like apparitions. By conjuring Native Americans as veritable ghosts, Polke poignantly addresses their gradual disappearance from contemporary consciousness.
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