Although Polke produced a range of works on the theme of the mushroom, the present work from 1975 is one of the൲ rare canvas versions he did on this subject. Using a candy-coloured palette, Polke here reinforces the connection between the ostensibly innocuous motif of the mushroom and its hallucinogeni🔯c capabilities. Just as he had done with his photographic series, the surface of the image is manipulated and disrupted, introducing artificial colouration to alter the image.

Polke introduced the motif of the magic mushroom into his work In the early 1970s, just after his Paris series in which he experimented by working under the hallucinogenic influence of LSD. In the burgeoning era of psychadelia at the end of the 1960s, the mushroom was adopted as the symbol of a generation of non-conformists. As Polke frankly admits: ''At this time I tried the mushroom. I ate them, and I smoked them as did many of my friends. It is something that belongs to the children and has the magical quality alluded to in Alice in Wonderland.'' (Sigmar Polke cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, 1995-96𒅌, p. 65). For Polke and other artists of his generation in the early 1970s, hallucinogenic drugs opened up creative possibilities beyond the rationalistic strictureꦿs of modern European culture. By working under the influence of mind-altering drugs, the creative exuberance of the mind is liberated from its ordinary fetters, a promise of freedom that ultimately inspired Polke to travel to parts of Central Asia and South America in 1974.

Having adopted the motif of the mushroom into a corpus of photographic works, using ink and other media to effect c🌺hemical disruption to the negative and print, Polke began exploring the religious, spiritual, and mind-altering capacities of the fungus on canvas.