Lot 32 D

One of the most important characteristics of our times is the permanent exposure of the individual to a flood of images. Digital images, media influences and visual stimuli pour in on us – unfiltered - every day. Most aspects of our everyday life are subject to a form of digitalisation, which is increasingly moving into the realm of falsification or even manipulation. Polke addressed this early on in his practice with the raster images and photographic manipulations of source material. He also explored materiality and the relationship between light and colour. The work offered here, from the series of interference pictures, is at once the product of a random principle and the result of a controlled process. While the light, pearly colour spreads out on the clay paper as if by chance, different shades of colour emerge. These, however, are influenced by the movement and orientation of the picture support. "Polke pushed his materials to a point where reason stumbles and things begin to take shape not through the artist's foresight or conscious action, but through non-rational conditions such as gravity, chance and the associative capacity of the unconscious. No binary system was satisfying, no ideology appealing, no geometry embodied the divine and no truth triumphed. Polke was obsessed with arriving at less imposed and less sentimental forms of expression through the use of chance; he wanted to liberate his materials from his control in order to subvert effortlessness and reach beyond what he already knew." (Kathy Halbreich, Alibis, An Introduction, in: Kathy Halbreich et al. (eds.), Alibis, Sigmar Polke, 1963-2013, Exh. cat. Museum Ludwig, Cologne et al., Munich 2015, p.72).