Untitled

‘Polke uses abstraction – a kind of abstract, if mechanical process – to punch holes in the representation of social reality – the dots are so many holes undermining the image they form, suggesting that it is a mass deception’ (D. Kuspit, quoted in Sigmar Polke: Alibis, exh. cat, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 74).

Executed on a semi-transparent, synthetic fabric ground within which a honeycomb-mesh of chicken-wire is embedded, this large, untitled painting is one of a series of light-reactive raster-dot paintings fusing multiple layers of abstract and representational imagery that Polke made in the late 1990s and early 21st Century. Marking a development of his experiments with transparent and semi-transparent paintings on lacquer and synthetic fabric in his Magic Lantern paintings of the early 1990s, this work presents a concentrated range of imagery through a varied use of one Polke’s signature motifs: the dot. Using a trademark of Polke’s painting in the early ‘60s, the raster-dot of printing technique, the honeycomb grid of the painting’s chicken-wire ground and a computer-generated dot-mapping of the human body, this work combines numerous dot-painting techniques to create a work whose imagery is constantly shifting and blending into each other. It is one of the first of a series of paintings in this vein that eventually culminated at an exhibition appropriately entitled The History of Everything held at the Dallas Museum of Art and Tate Modern between 2002 and 2004. Created in 1998, this untitled painting was one made in conjunction with a series of pictures, known as ‘Printing Mistake’ paintings that Polke created for an exhibition at the Michael Werner Gallery this same year.

Centred around a computer-generated dot-map illustration of a woman’s body, seen only from the neck downwards and shown clearly, accurately and sharply delineated against an ambiguous and indistinct background of seemingly accidental pourings, splashes and drips of paint made over the honeycomb grid, the painting is an exercise in contrasting patterns of representation. Indeed, with its linear column of women’s faces rendered increasingly vaguely in a series of blue raster-dot images at the right-hand side of the picture, it seems to indicate a multiple choice of different faces for the headless, and vaguely robotic dot-map figure at the picture’s centre. In this way the painting asserts itself as a kind of multiple-reality identikit exploring the ambiguities of representation in which the viewer is invited to play a part.

This interactive aspect of the work, one that permeates much of Polke’s art, is augmented by the ground of the painting being semi-transparent and therefore responsive to the changing light conditions into which the painting is set. Embracing flux as the only true condition of reality the image he presents here, as in so many of Polke’s most mature works, is one that is not only ambiguous but also constantly changing. Not only does the artist provide multiple layers of imagery within this work and, seemingly also, permutations for the building of a life-size image of a female nude, but the vague, ambiguous cloud-like splashes of paint in the background, also interact in constantly changing ways with the varied use of dot-forms to build a demonstrably fabricated and artificial image. As Donald Kuspit, has said of Polke’s work in this respect, the artist makes use of dots as a kind of ‘abstract, if mechanical process – to punch holes in the representation of social reality’ and undermine ‘the image they form – suggesting that [the imagery they present] is a mass deception’ (D. Kuspit, quoted in Sigmar Polke: Alibis, exh. cat, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 74).

Polke himself said of his use of dots that ‘I like the technical character of the raster images, as well as their cliché quality. This quality makes me think of multiplication and reproduction, which is also related to imitation. I like the impersonal, neutral, and manufactured quality of these images. The raster to me, is a system, a principle, a method, a structure. It divides, disperses, arranges and makes everything the same. I also like that enlarging the pictures makes them blurry and sets the dots in motion. I like that the dots switch between being recognizable and unrecognizable, the ambiguity of this situation, the fact that it stays open…In that perspective I think that the raster I am using does show a specific view, that it is a general situation and interpretation: the structure of our time, the structure of social order, of a culture. Standardized, divided, fragmented, rationed, grouped, specialized…’ (S. Polke, quoted in D. Hülsmanns, ‘Kultur des Rasters. Ateliergespräch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke’, Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966).