Sigmar Polke - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London Monday, June 27, 2016 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Urbi et Orbi, Paris
    Private Collection, Paris

  • Catalogue Essay

    ‘What exactly does it mean to be vulgar? Sticking your fingers up your nose? Farting? Doing something improper? Being poorly dressed or groomed? Not brushing your teeth? Words like “vulgar” don’t get us anywhere… There are many other miseries beside vulgarity.’ (S. Polke, Interview of Sigmar Polke by Bice Curiger, ‘La peinture est une ignominie’, Artpress, No. 91, April 1985, p. 8) Set within the artistically fertile context of the sixties and seventies Germany, Sigmar Polke invites the viewer into his psychedelic world. The sixties marked the artist’s education at The Academy in Dusseldorf where Joseph Beuys instructed a re-evaluation of German art and the Fluxus movement was in full force.

    The 1970s, of which the present lot is a part of was a decade of experimentation. Travel and hallucinogenics marked this decade, as Polke fed his desire to achieve vast states of consciousness. The Untitled work on paper of 1973 is symbolic of this time. It manifests in an enigmatic balance of both figuration and abstraction. Swathes of light colour, layered with the strong line of the sole female figure in an act of self-pleasure, is indicative of the sexually charged works on paper of the early 1970s. Further still, the piece is covered in the prints of a rubber office stamp, a rather spontaneous and gratuitous fashion. Here, as ever, Polke puts to paper social conditions with a cryptic irony that is wholeheartedly independent from his German contemporaries. ‘What I’m interested in knowing is whether we’re situation over or under, whether it’s what’s on top that counts or the superimposition of layers.’ (S. Polke, Ibid, p. 6)

Property from an Important Parisian Collection

131

Untitled

1973
ink, acrylic, and watercolour on paper
99.5 x 69 cm (39 1/8 x 27 1/8 in.)
Signed and dated 'S. Polke 73' lower right.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Contact Specialist
Henry Highley
Head of Sale
+ 44 20 7318 4061

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 28 June 2016