He was a prolific artist who constantly moving from one visual revolution to another, often satirizing different styles that he saw around him such as that of the constructivists and early conceptual art. But it is his works in the 1980s onwards where he embarked upon a series of experimental paintings – often termed alchemical - which inspires me the most. His earlier experimental paintings like Watchtower II, and synthetic resin paintings, actually changed colours as the conditions of temperature and humidity around it changed. By making paintings whose colour or visibility alters over time and whose appearance changes as the viewer moves about them, he has animated paintings in a new way and rendered them unsusceptible to photography which at that time seriously called into question the originality and even the authenticity of art.
I am very fond of his works which see the layering of acrylic on to printed fabric, but more prominently his works that centre around or were formed from his interest in transparency. His discovery of polyester fabric coated in resin becoming see-through resulted in beautifully fluid, almost ghostly splashes of paint overlaying the gridded geometries of the of the stretcher bars the fabric was stretched on to, such as in his triptych Apparitions (Apparizione) (1992). He also brought together abstraction and figuration by introducing ghostly outlines, traced from projected images or produced with stencils, into expanses of canvas dominated by spills and spreads of liquid and powdered pigment like in his Durer Loop paintings.
Polke’s
frequent use of lacquers, glazes and especially artificial resins and other
layering mediums to create these abstract, wonderfully textural paintings
encourage me to make textural surfaces of my own, especially since I am
thinking about projecting on to a surface. Though I will be limited to more
affordable alternatives to resin and glazes, I think it will be beneficial to
experiment with painting using mediums and acrylic on transparent or
translucent material such as PVC or even polyester fabric to create marks and
layers. Another point of interest is the colours that are prominent in his
pieces, the colours that appeal to me the most being the yellows and purples.
Within my collages I haven’t really stuck to a specific colour scheme, they’re
just an array of contrasting colours but if I was to create gesturally expressive
paintings, I would be undoubtedly inspired by Sigmar Polke’s palette.
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