Sigmar Polke- untitled

Sigmar Polke - Untitled

Gelatin silver print. 1975.

104.5 x 135.5cm (41 1/8 x 53 3/8in.)

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266855)

Sigmar Polke was a German painter whose work is characterized by the artist’s unique brand of cleverness, irony, and humor. Though it largely started as response to the influx of American media into post-war Germany, Polke’s work was initially influenced by the Capitalist Realism movement he founded with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg while they studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1963. Together, these artists mounted a response to the nationalistic themes of Socialist Realism developing in what was then East Germany, with Polke’s practice serving as a particularly sharp critique of his country’s burgeoning consumer society. For his “dot paintings,” or Rasterbilder, Polke enlarged printed images to enhance the Benday dots—made popular by Roy Lichtenstein—to comment on the artifice in American Pop Art and culture. Born on February 13, 1941 in Oels, Germany, Polke’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and artist books reflected his tendency to use untraditional materials such as soot, detergent, and synthetic fabrics throughout his career. He died on June 10, 2010 in Cologne, Germany at the age of 69.

(http://www.artnet.com/artists/sigmar-polke/)

One of the most provocative artists of postwar Europe, Sigmar Polke has created works critical of Western culture since 1963, when he and fellow artist Gerhard Richter began using photography as the basis for paintings that satirized the look and message of consumer culture. Since that time Polke has continued to use photography as the breeding ground for innovation.

During the 1970s Polke painted little but traveled widely with his camera—to Paris, New York, Brazil, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His subjects were night life, low life, the underworld, and the Third World—arenas in which life is lived in defiance or ignorance of established Western social rules. The basis of this image is one of a series of negatives exposed in a bar in São Paolo, Brazil, showing a group of men drinking.

Polke considers the darkroom a sort of alchemic laboratory in which he can explore infinite mutations of imagery. With the negative in his enlarger, the artist developed this large sheet selectively, pouring on photographic solutions and repeatedly creasing and folding wet paper. The resulting abstract organic forms thus issue from and reexpress the boozy, convivial energy of the scene.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266855)

Polke uses contrast between the dark and the light figures to create a jarring and striking juxtaposition between the shapes. The use of shape in an unfamiliar way gives the piece an unsettling feeling.

This piece exemplifies the visuals experienced when one confronts the depths of fear. It could be seen as an abstract representation of fear itself. The disturbing qualities of the shapes and darkness translate a sense of contemplative terror into the viewer.