Cloud Paintings

1992
Sigmar Polke

4 panels: resin and paint on silk fabric, meteorite
Meteorite: 43 x 90 x 5 cm - Each painting: 300 x 500 cm

Four billion years old, it was the third biggest found at Sikhote-Alin in Siberia, the site of a meteorite shower in February 1947. This extra-terrestrial object, placed on a plinth, is a concrete sign of the cosmic dimension inherent in the work, giving it an ethereal, immaterial quality. By combining it with the golden paintings featuring fragments of clouds in subtle variations, from transparent to translucent to opaque, Polke shows the whole scope of painting’s vocation to be understood as both a physical and a metaphysical experience.

© The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne / Adagp, Paris, 2014. Photo © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Martin Argyroglo © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne / Adagp, Paris, 2014. Photo © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Martin Argyroglo

Hangs

Expressionist and contemplative works

From 17 December 2014 to 18 May 2015

Born in Silesia, a German province that became part of Poland after World War II, Sigmar Polke moved to West Germany in 1953. Following a brief apprenticeship with a glassmaker, he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Gerhard Richter. Polke first used photomechanical dots in his painting in 1963, marking the start of his image manipulations.

In the 1970s, Polke began superimposing iconographic and abstract motifs. While continuing to diversify the type of medium he used (printed or transparent), he also worked with pigments and rarer materials such as lacquers, solvents, artificial resins, silver oxide and arsenic. This constant experimentation, use of transparent mediums and fabrics printed with commonplace motifs and borrowing of pre-existing images make his painting varied, hybrid and rich. By using iconography relating to traumatic historical events (the Reign of Terror, concentration camps) and by “quoting” famous artists (Goya, Dürer), Polke invites the viewer to question the authority of representation. Open to contradiction, he proposes, alongside this critical reading of the image, a hallucinatory experience, as suggested metaphorically by one of his series, Laterna Magica.