Ohne Titel

In the 1960s, Pop Art, a movement that placed the consumer world of the 20th century at the centre of its art, introduced the grid into painting. Its structure, borrowed from the printing process of the mass media of the time, becomes the carrier of the colour substance, while the spaces in between remain undefined. The motif always remains reduced to a network of dots. This creates an exciting visual event in Sigmar Polke's gouache on paper ‘untitled’: while the individual dots merge into a whole from a distance, the pictorial context completely dissolves from close up. The artist could have applied the paint with a brush, as evidenced by the green colour that runs across the picture. In his work on paper, however, he transfers and enlarges dotted grids from printed matter in order to thematise an ambivalence between abstract pattern and figurative representation.
While a figure is formed from black grid dots in the foreground, patterns in primary colours emerge from the background of the picture, which seem to merge onto the background. They refer to a second creative principle of the artist, who was born in Oels in Lower Silesia in 1941 and died in Cologne in 2010. In his eagerness to experiment, he developed so-called pouring pictures from the 1980s onwards. Due to his growing interest in randomness, Sigmar Polke poured colour directly onto the substrate, creating random gradients and forms. The present work from 1994 thus combines two of the most influential stylistic devices in the artist's oeuvre, which is located between abstraction and figuration.