Picture "Untitled" (1997) (Unique piece)
Picture "Untitled" (1997) (Unique piece)
Quick info
unique piece | signed | photography on paper | framed | size 48 x 36 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Untitled" (1997) (Unique piece)
Xerox photograph on paper, 1997. Signed. Motif size/sheet size 42 x 29.7 cm. Size in frame 48 x 36 cm as shown.
About Sigmar Polke
1941-2010
Sigmar Polke, born in Oels, Silesia, is considered one of the most important painters of the present day. International exhibitions and retrospectives in San Francisco, New York, Bonn and Berlin as well as important awards such as the Golden Lion of the 42nd Venice Biennale praise his work.
Together with Gerhard Richter, he proclaimed "Capitalist Realism" during their time at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1963. They developed a specifically German version of American Pop Art, with which they took aimed the mustiness of the Adenauer years.
Unlike his American colleges, he didn’t use Brillo boxes. Instead, Polke adapted motifs from the German magazine "Bäckerblume" (eng.: baker’s flower), and instead of working with screen-printing techniques, he painted his grid pictures dot by dot by hand. From the beginning, style and motif quotations played an important role for him. He used media images, illustrations and comics.
With humour and irony, Sigmar Polke commented in his works on the bourgeois and political appearances of the affluent society. Former German Minister of State and Representative of the Federal Government for Culture Bernd Neumann paid tribute to Sigmar Polke: "He was a critical, ironic and self-deprecating observer of post-war history and its artistic commentator."
A process for producing images by the action of light, which became widely known in 1839. Photography quickly became the basis for the expanding image industry that pushed the manually produced pictures, paintings and drawings into the background.
The avant-garde painting adopted photographic form elements, to ensure its painting validity. In the 1920s, many avant-garde painters devoted themselves to photography. With his photographs and photomontages, the American painter Man Ray developed new means of expression in modern art, the so-called "rayographs".
The Pop Art of the 1960s varied and alienated the public photograph with the help of technical means. The American pop artist Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) is the most famous master of this art movement with his images and image series created in this way.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art that has been personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolours, drawing, etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there exist the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a type of modern art, that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
In the history of arts, the starting point of this trend was the work "Les Meules" (1890/1891) by Claude Monet, in which for the first time a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.