Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke   Untitled   2006

“Darkness and light inextricably coexist, as social bonding coexists with aggression against the other. Everything is on its way to becoming something else. Everything we see is likely to be something other than what we think it is, or on its way to being seen as something other. We ourselves are always flowing out of ourselves, into the ozone of transcendence, into the cauldron of desire or the collective mystery of society. This whole exhibition, in fact, might be considered a succinct catalogue of the ways we get it wrong --an atlas of roads-to-hell well paved with good intentions -- an index of quick fictions that demonstrate the frailty of our aspirations to integrity and understanding. The gift these paintings make to us, then, is the vertiginous, anxious pleasure we derive from being freely lost, from not seeing anything clearly and not knowing anything for sure. In Polke's aesthetic, these anxious pleasures are the best we can expect from a world in which one pays too high a price for the comfort of certainty.”

                            Dave Hickey   from the catalogue Sigmar Polke: History of Everything