MAKING ART

So off to London. As I was going to a show in the afternoon, « Barnum », I had chosen a hotel at Kings Cross. Not a five star but  London is expensive these days.

The show was on at the Wimbeldon Theatre



Theatre
I’m sure we have all had the same experience. Sitting next to someone, knowing the face, but who is it? It was an actor but perhaps I’ll never remember who. We chatted along quite happily. He knew his musical comedy and even if I planted a few remarks on unusual shows, he still had something to say about them. Reminded me of a trip years ago when I was traveling by plane to Hamburg for a business meeting. I knew the man’s face so well. We too chatted along very much at ease talking about everything but theatre. Upon arrival, he said that he would have to leave me as he was expecting to be picked up. Picked up indeed. It was Peter Ustinov. The show I saw was  Barnun. Quite fabulons  and I came back prepared for a couple of exhibitions at the Tate.

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Sigmar_Polke_Friends 1965/66


 Sigmar Polke always brings this kind of image to mind. Not that I really like polka dots - anywhere for that matter - but something told me that there was more to him than spots




Police Pig 1986
Arriving at the Tate at opening time you can be faced with crowds or just a few people. This time it was the latter so up I went to the first floor and would look at Malevich later. 

I don’t consider Polke to be an artist but rather a creator, someone who is always experimenting with colors, shapes, materials, films, writing and moving from one « movement » to another. He was born in Silesia in 1941, had to leave his home with the advance of the Russian army at the end of the second war. Again in 1953 he was moved on once more as his family was displaced and fled East Germany to live in Dusseldorf. He settled in Cologne in the late 70’s and died in 2010. I had always thought of him as  German rather than with Russian roots. He was considered the most radical, experimental and influential artist of the past 50 years, continually disobeyed accepted theories of art or an artist. I would think a very sceptical person and always in pursuit of freedom and concerned by the radical front and the Nazi regime. He challenged the silence about the Nazi past and the piety of some other German artists responding to it. The swastika appears visibly or not in so much of his work. These images, I could not relate to.


All his painting seems to send up a regime. Advertising, false promises of consumerism, greed generated by consumerism - this was a movement called Capital Realism.


 sausage eater 1963



Animal in Blue 1983

Telephone drawing  1975

Then came the dots which he painted with a free hand at first. Must have driven him mad. Then he began to use a  punctured screen. A technique which you can see in a picture but not necessarily in a photo.

Alice in Wonderland 1971

Polka Dot tree house 1976


There was the Modern Art too. Here he appeared to suggest that modern abstraction was no longer a serious option for young artists and only fit for parody. That maybe so but I liked his minimalist approach and experimentation with colors.


Face

Heron 1966

Alibi

Triologie

Lapsus Lazulli ll 1994

City Painting 1968

Modern Art

Watch Tower with Geese

Cosmic Rays  mid 60's

Gold lump 1982 - in Australia





Cloud 1989
Japanese dances on paper 1966


Not of course to forget his experimentation with paper.....


It’s senseless to go through his different periods. The man was quite eccentric, using drugs to get effects in his work. He travelled widely - even to Australia where he visited Uluru…here he made a film called « Uluru Olgas » looking at the changing colors of the rocks as if they were a mass of pigment. (in 1982). 

For me, he made art, finding ways to disturb or change images and see everything in a different light. This to the extent that when I started looking at the vast collection of his works on Internet, I could never have said that « that was a Polke of such and such a period » - nor for that matter would I have recognized the artist at all. Well, perhaps the polka dots.



Polke as Astronaut  - 60's

Polke in python skin 1973

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