PRETTY UGLY

Sigmar Polke said, “The unforseeable is what turns out to be interesting." He might have added, There is no telling what the unforseeable is going to look like; it could be very ugly. As I walked through the Polke exhibit at MoMA I was bowled over by the passion and energy in the work. There’s a vitality to every sketch, every canvas and collage, every page of every notebook, on display. Polke generated ideas feverishly and implemented them with startling immediacy. Each piece, however small in scale or ambition, looks as if it absolutely had to be made, as if, in it, the artist is searching for something essential.

Of course there’s no covenant that art must be pretty, but it’s something I hope for. In addition to being powerful (i.e. carrying indelible emotional impact), and surprising (i.e. exposing something unseen) I expect a great painting or sculpture to be complexly internally balanced, judiciously composed, possessing a deep order, a formal beauty, that stills and silences.

Polke’s work, which is substantial, has something altogether different: an untidy, over-ripe physicality. He makes collages cluttered with roughly cut magazine clippings, and paintings with arrays of images running across patchworks of printed fabrics. His is a strange, unglamorous style. He leaves audacious stretches of a canvas bare, he draws by filling the margins of a page with cartoons, he studs plywood and wire sculptures with little baby potatoes. The uncensored aesthetic gives his work a highly personal, expressive character. It’s not ugly, really, because it’s unconcerned with what is beautiful.

Image courtesy of the Estate of Sigmar Polke.

August 01, 2014 by Nalina Moses

What revelations there are at the Met’s show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years aren’t about Warhol. They’re about the other fifty-nine artists, all Warhol-inspired, who’s work is featured. There are three Gerhard Richter paintings from the 1960’s that have the same superfine handling of paint and dreamy, blurred finish as the photo-realist work from the 90’s he's famous for. There are also some recent paintings by Luc Tuymans, whose spectral brushwork and coloring blunt their acrid politics. One 2005 portrait of Condoleeza Rice is rendered in a web of translucent, tissue-like layers that convey tenderness more than satire. These men paint magnificently.

But the most impressive of the other fifty-nine might be Sigmar Polke. From the handful of works collected here, dispersed in different galleries, he emerges as a singular voice. There’s a quilt on which the artist’s drawings and doodlings run against the patterns and piecing of fabric. It’s a rich, clotted surface that trumps both the pictorial and compositional pleasures of traditional painting. And there’s Plastic Tubs, which shows the things to us in workmanlike strokes and candy colors on a canvas that’s left largely, strangely blank. Polke’s quilt paintings prefigure the 80’s assemblages of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, which also combine discordant materials and images, but lack their all-out sensuality. Polke’s more conventional paintings, like Plastic Tubs, while fine, lack the ravishing surfaces of Richters’ and Tuymans’. Regardless of the medium Polke, like Warhol, remains supremely cool. He overturns expectations with wit and without winking.

Plastik-Wannen [Plastic Tubs], 1964, by Sigmar Polke.

November 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses