“Polke’s works were everything painting wasn’t supposed to be: vulgar, mocking, parodic, decorative, heterotopic, discontinuous, self-reflexive, and self-critical […] Polke was the consummate and emblematic Post-modern painter.”
—Alex Farquarshon

Created in 1985, during a period of increasing international visibility and acclaim for the artist, Sigmar Polke’s Die Motte is a richly layered example of his coveted Stoffbilder paintings, an important body of work that the artist first embarked upon in 1964. Combining commercially produced fabrics and painterly gesture in provocative new arrangements, these works are supremely representative of Polke’s notoriously multidisciplinary, alchemical approach to materials and his confounding of conventional pictorial logic that reached new heights after his triumphant return to painting in the 1980s. Enigmatic and elusive, Die Motte swerves between abstraction and representation, layers of overlapping image and pattern in paint, resin, and lacquer interrupting and disrupting any straightforward reading of its surface, dislodging meaning and exemplifying the ‘postmodern play’ for which the artist is best known.ⁱ

 

Polke’s Postmodern Play

 

Read as a direct challenge to the traditions and conventions of painting itself, replacing the blank canvas with mass-produced and often decidedly kitsch commercial fabrics enabled Polke to address more complex questions related to the legacies of early 20th-century European art and post-war German culture with perspicacious humour and wit. Moving from East to West Germany in the 1960s Polke, like many artists of his generation, was confronted with an unexpected abundance of wealth and commodity items, resulting in his quick adpotion of these fetishised items and objects of desire as a means of picturing the ‘unstable orderings underlying the circulation of food.’ⁱⁱ Like these images, the inexpensive fabrics incorporated by Polke ‘vocally manifest their historical-social origin’, carrying their meanings and associations with the bourgeois home with them, undermining the aura of art by imbuing it with irony and kitsch.ⁱⁱⁱ Further than simply providing the ground for these paintings, the fabrics represent the ‘foundation for his entire painting and appropriation practice.’^iv

 

Following a period of extensive investigation into hallucinogenic modes of consciousness in the 1970s, Polke built on these earlier pictorial experiments, finding new ways of defamiliarising the image, either by obscuring it through abstract pattern, or by depicting ‘several layers of consciousness at the same time by means of superimposing one or more figural motifs over a ground of printed fabric.’^v Reinforcing the alchemical properties of painting itself, these increasingly vertiginous images replicate and recreate the perceptual experience of hallucinogens to powerful effect, refusing any single viewpoint, dissolving boundaries between figure, ground, and fragment, and opening themselves up to a radical mode of simultaneity. Throughout the 1980s, Polke pushed these experiments even further, finding novel ways to generate material processes of change in the paintings themselves as his unconventional materials responded to changes in humidity and temperature. These experiments were fully realised in Polke’s award-winning presentation for La Biennale di Venezia in 1986, the year after the present work’s execution. Responding to the theme of ‘art and science’, Polke painted the walls of the German pavilion in thin layers of chemical compounds that reacted to the climate thus changing colour from pink to blue hues during the run of a day, extending these alchemical experiments again in his 1988 retrospective at the Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Polke and Picabia

 

Polke’s fascination with the qualities of transparency, translucency, and superimposition can be traced back to the very outset of his career, and in the incorporation of a heavy, dark outline in the rendering of free-floating satyr figures here we might even trace the influence of the artist’s early training in the methods and techniques of stained-glass production. Confusing boundaries between inside and outside and superimposing these two elements simultaneously, we can certainly see how the transparent coloured glass panes with their bold, leaded outlines would have guided Polke in his pictorial investigations, making his paintings ever more mutable.

 

In art historical terms, Francis Picabia’s enigmatic series of Transparency paintings from the 1920s and '30s also provide an important touchstone. An artist who eschewed stylistic predictability and favoured an experimental, investigative mode of picture-making, in his Transparency paintings Picabia borrowed and sampled a wide range of imagery from Classical, Romanesque, and Renaissance sources, bringing these compositional elements into a compelling dialogue with the artist’s long-standing interest in emergent photographic techniques to create strange and strikingly surreal superimpositions. Refusing centuries of pictorial illusionism, Picabia reduced his forms to simplified outlines, repeating and flattening these motifs so that they float over one another and forge new relationships in an otherworldly space devoid of perspective. Most compellingly, translating to ‘The Moth’, the title selected by Polke for the present work gestures towards Picabia’s own elusive titles for these works, frequently borrowed seemingly at random from Paul Girod’s encyclopedia of butterflies and moths, L’Atlas de poche des papillons de France, Suisse et Belgique. During this pivotal period, Polke would take these ideas of transparency and superimposition considerably further, layering his compositions with lacquers and resins which both obscured the image and made the ground more visible, as well as introducing a vast range of non-conventional materials with their own destructive or mutable qualities. It is this relentless formal experimentation and its philosophical underpinnings that best characterise Polke’s practice, and across his varied and expansive body of work, the fabric paintings stand especially as a testament to his radical vision and playfully provocative spirit.

 

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.

• Examples of Polke’s Stoffbilder paintings are held in major institutional collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Neue Galerie, Kassel; and The Art Institute of Chicago, amongst others.

• The subject of major solo exhibitions at the 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 Kathrin Rottmann, ‘Polke in Context: A Chronology’, Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 41.

ⁱⁱ Kathrin Rottmann, ‘Polke in Context: A Chronology’, Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 25.

ⁱⁱⁱ Benjamin Buchloch, quoted in Christine Mehring, ‘Polke’s Patterns’, Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 238.

^iv Benjamin Buchloch, quoted in Christine Mehring, ‘Polke’s Patterns’, Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 240.

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