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Sigmar Polke
"The stairway of Cannes", abstract print, signed and numbered by Polke 9/75

2000

About the Item

Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) was one of the most important german artists of the late 20th century. In 1961 he joined with Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter the class of Karl Otto Götz at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and these four upcoming artists presented their latest works in 1963 in their self-curated exhibition to bring the newest art movements from oversea and Paris to Germany. On the invitation cards they printed the terminologies „Pop Art, Junk Culture, Nouveau Realisme, Common Object Painting, Neo Dada, New Vulgarismus, Antikunst, Know-Nothing-Genre“ and they proclaimed for themselves to be the first artists to show Pop Art, independently developed in Germany, not just as a copy or an American import. But Polke showed right from the beginning an ironic distance to the sociocritical style of his combatants, that will run through his entire Oeuvre. Influenced by the Fluxus and Neo Dada scene around Joseph Beuys, Daniel Spoerri, Dick Higgins and others in the early 1960s, Polke developed his own style characterized by an anarchic mind and esprit. Similar to the Pop Art Polke searched for the aesthetic in the trivial but here too he simultaneously disavowed the trivial through irony. Very typical for Polke are the famous grid images, known from newspaper printings, where we have horizontal, uniform lines of small dots and by combining certain dots there arises a form. By using perforated sheets and airbrush he could overlay more monochrome grids to create vibrating images and he often played in the printing process with enforced mistakes and errors to disassemble the firm surface of an image to a process of decomposition. Next to the irony and anarchy other keywords to his works are heterogeneity, poly-perspectivity and multivalent metamorphoses in which every reality could be something possibly different at the same time. A world where everything is connected, not by fundamental unity, but by fragmentary dispersion. Because there is no one true reality, he transfers his works in an intermediate state of transformability. Die Treppe von Cannes (2000) Offsetprint on cardboard 70 x 50 cm (sheet size) 71.2 x 51.4 cm (frame size) Original wooden frame (white) by the workshop of the Gallery Heinz Holtmann, Schüller, Eifel, Germany Edition of 75 and XX Artists Proofs, signed, dated and numbered (9/75) by hand. Not yet in Cat. Raisonné. (Edit. von der Osten). The print "Die Treppe von Cannes" ("The stairs of Cannes") shows a cutout of the famous red carpet on the stairs of the film festival of Cannes with his unmistakable railings in black and white and dissoluted in single dots. In the lefter middle of the print is a big, almost glowing white and slightly purpled circle that seems on the first view like a mistake. By the abstraction in single dots the stairs almost disappear in single unconnected lines and the viewer must have the image of the stairs of Cannes in head to recognize them. The glowing circle in the middle beams at the beholder like a paparazzis flash and is in a deep contrast to the darker lines. In this work Polke plays with the techniques form the newspaper printing and abstracts the subject into single lines and dots. The viewer is forced to take a closer look at the picture and to reassemble the individual parts.
  • Creator:
    Sigmar Polke (1941 - 2010, German)
  • Creation Year:
    2000
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 28.04 in (71.2 cm)Width: 20.24 in (51.4 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Cologne, DE
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU134427896362
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