“He questions the very idea of a painting as a layer of pigment on canvas, either as a perspectival ‘window’ on a represented visual reality, or as an abstract patterning of colour and form.”
—A.S. Byatt

 

With its powerful, centrifugal force and kaleidoscopic array of bright, acid colour, Silberner Zwilling is a vibrant and absorbing work that exemplifies the studied psychedelia of Sigmar Polke’s work from the late 1970s. Coming to auction for the first time, having been held in the collection of Polke’s lawyer Gerhard Knull and his descendants for many years, the work was exhibited shortly after its execution at the Kunsthalle zu Kiel & Schleswig-Holsteinischer Kunstverein. The exhibition's title, Mu Nieltnam Netorruprup, presented viewers with a playful puzzle, a pun written backwards and reffering to the distinctive red cap of the Fliegenpilz or fly agaric mushroom, known for its hallucinogenic qualities and featuring prominently Polke's prints from the period. Like these psychedelic images, Silberner Zwilling similarly captures the blend of formal experiment, hallucinatory consciousness, and exploration that best characterises the hugely significant paintings from this important period of Polke’s career. Executed in 1975 - the same year that Polke was awarded the prize for painting at the São Paulo Bienal and the year before his first institutional retrospective which, hosted by the Kunsthalle Tübingen, also produced the first nearly complete survey of the artist’s career - it is one of only a handful of paintings produced during this period, preoccupied as the artist was with photographic technologies, communal living experiments, and counter-culture.

 

Visually complex, the composition shifts between tangled lines and layered motifs, embracing an openness and multiplicity that defies any straightforward reading or fixed meaning. Almost obscured by overlaid layers of neon coloured emulsion and spray paint featuring Polke’s familiar hand-painted raster dots, the centre of the work is dominated by the large form of a hippopotamus, a souvenir, perhaps, from the artist’s extensive and exploratory travels through North Africa, Indonesia, and Afghanistan during this period. Less than capturing a faithful visual record of the creature however, Polke’s interest is more closely focused on questions of representation, appropriation, and art’s claims to carry truth. Encircling the rounded form of the powerful, peaceful creature Polke has included familiar symbols related to signs of the Zodiac, evoking both the cosmos far above our terrestrial selves, and our human desire to impose order and structure onto chaos.

Hallucinatory Consciousness

 

Widely regarded as one of the most radical and innovative artists working in Germany in the second half of the 20^th century, Polke’s experimentation with materials led him to incorporate fabric, photographs, words, and images in his compositions, eschewing neatly organised art historical narratives and signposting the inadequacies of knowledge itself. The complex layering of forms so sophisticatedly deployed here had long been a feature of Polke’s practice, figuring prominently in earlier Rasterbilder and Stoffbilder works. Through both techniques Polke explored ways of defamiliarising the image, either by obscuring it through abstract pattern, or by exploring new ways of depicting ‘several layers of consciousness at the same time by means of superimposing one or more figural motifs over a ground of printed fabric.’ⁱ

 

Following his early training in the methods and techniques of stained-glass production, Polke remained fascinated by the qualities of transparency, translucency, and superimposition allowed by the medium, and the ways in which a painting can be at once materially fixed and perceived as mutable. In this, his work looks back to Francis Picabia’s enigmatic series of Transparency paintings from the 1920s and 30s, where a wide range of borrowed imagery from Classical, Romanesque, and Renaissance sources was brought into dialogue with the artist’s interest in emergent photographic technologies to create strange and surreal superimpositions that slipped between the scared and profane. Although stylistically quite different, both Polke and Picabia shared a restless drive towards experimentation and refused to adhere to any one visual style. Polke would take these ideas of transparency and superimposition considerably further, using transparent layers, lacquers, and resins which both obscured the image and made the canvas frame visible, as well as an alchemical range of non-traditional materials with their own destructive or mutable qualities, formal invention going hand in hand with a more philosophical interest in the tensions between order and disorder.

 

As Polke began to experiment with hallucinogenic substances, these approaches allowed him to explore the pictorial possibilities of altered states of consciousness to powerful effect, creating vertiginous images that both replicate and recreate the perceptual experience of hallucinogens, and re-enforce the magic, alchemical properties of painting itself. A pivotal and rare painting from this hugely important period of Polke’s career, Silberner Zwilling signposts the radical directions into which Polke would push his practice over the following decade, where the physical qualities of his paintings took on the perceptual mutability that we can see here. Without a fixed, single point from which to approach his compositions, Polke’s paintings increasingly opened themselves up to this mode of multiplicity, forms coming in and out of focus as viewers moved around the canvas. In the mid-1980s Polke would push these experiments even further, finding ways of making his paintings physically change as the materials responded to changes in humidity and temperature as in the large wall painting presented in the German Pavilion of the 1986 Venice Biennale and the large mural created for his landmark 1988 retrospective at the Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. For Polke, who was himself fascinated by astrology, the incorporation of Zodiac symbology here speaks powerfully to our need to impose order onto the chaos of life, and our tendency to seek truth in images, a fallacy underscored by the perceptual disruption and mutability of the painting itself.  

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• A defining figure of post-war German art, Sigmar Polke’s practice was restlessly inventive and innovative, pushing boundaries on both material and conceptual levels.

 

• Executed in 1975 and coming to auction for the first time, the present work is an exceptionally rare and significant painting from this pivotal moment in Polke’s career.

 

• The subject of major solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art amongst others, Polke’s works are now housed in the permanent collections of major international institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

 

ⁱ John Caldwell, ‘Sigmar Polke’ in Sigmar Polke, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Art, 1990, p. 11.