Galerie Schmela, Berlin (acquired directly from the artist) 
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004

Schwerin, Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Sigmar Polke: Transit, October - December 1996, p. 4, illustrated (in the artist's studio) and p. 110, illustrated in colour
Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; and Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Sigmar Polke: Alchemist, January - July 2001, p. 76, no. 33, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to fully convey the iridescence of the silver fabric. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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“Polke’s true significance lies beyond the antic surfaces of his art, in a philosophical attitude that has haunted recent artistic theory and practice like a ghost in a machine. It is an attitude of bottomless scepticism that contemplates… its own endlessly ramifying contradictions.”
Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The Daemon and Sigmar Polke’ in: Exh. Cat., San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sigmar Polke, 1990, p. 17. Executed in 1985, Ohne Titel (Würfel) (Untitled (Dice)) manifests Sigmar Polke’s brilliant and ambitious process of mark-making, as well as his skilful negotiation of the boundary between painterly gesture and manufactured form. The work belongs to an iconic series that Polke made using industrially produced fabric, which he initiated in the 1960s with major works such as Palme auf Autostoff (Palm Tree on Fabric), 1969. To create these works, he poured and splashed paint over the regulated patterns of manufactured materials to deliberately disrupt and subvert the geometry of mass produced fabric. Indeed, in the present work, an amalgamation of patterned fabric and dispersed pigment form a pictorial flow of competing influences, colour and form. Polke’s work thus raises critical questions about aesthetic conventions, challenging ideas concerning authorship, spectatorship and authenticity. As art critic Peter Schjeldahl attests, “Polke’s true significance lies beyond the antic surfaces of his art, in a philosophical attitude that has haunted recent artistic theory and practice like a ghost in a machine. It is an attitude of bottomless scepticism that contemplates… its own endlessly ramifying contradictions” (Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The Daemon and Sigmar Polke’ in: Exh. Cat., San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sigmar Polke, 1990, p. 17).

In Ohne Titel (Würfel), the painting’s support is composed of two different fabrics: to the left, a black expanse of material patterned with vibrant dice from which the painting’s title is drawn; to the right a smaller stretch of fabric in a shimmering metallic silver adorned with colourful dots. Uniting the composition is a gestural splattering of white paint which drips, spreads and disperses across the pictorial plane with dynamic force. In reference to commercial printing systems, the work harks back to Polke's iconic Rasterbilder of the 1960s and yet simultaneously encapsulates the artist’s exceptional return to the medium of painting in the 1980s after a decade of experimenting with other media such as photography and film. Commenting on these machinations, art historian Sean Rainbird has stated: “Polke appears now to delegate ever more processes in his painting, while remaining in ultimate control... [His motifs] are often readable only as fragments depicting human agency, against the increasingly unstructured grounds on which he has limited the autograph mark by allowing the liquids he applies to find their own final shape” (Sean Rainbird, ‘Seams and Appearances: learning to paint with Sigmar Polke’ in: Exh. Cat., Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, Sigmar Polke, Join the Dots, 1995, p. 22). In spilling, layering and dispersing paint across the pictorial plane, Polke procures an effect that flits between translucency and opacity, in places offering a veiled intimation of the patterned fabric beneath. This almost alchemical aesthetic recalls the artist’s influential apprenticeship at a stained-glass factory in Dusseldorf, which he undertook early on in his career. As such, Polke’s work of the 1980s exhibits complex and multifarious influences, constituting an exceptionally productive period in his practice. Indeed, just a year after Ohne Titel (Würfel) was executed, Polke received the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Biennale, denoting the mid-1980s as one of the most significant and formative periods of his career.

Polke's work at once challenges us to unravel the riddles presented across the canvas and simultaneously throws open the door to endless interpretation. Exploring the enigmatic nature of Polke’s oeuvre, Schjeldahl writes, “To learn more and more about him, it has sometimes seemed to me, is to know less and less. His art is like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland rabbit hole, entrance to a realm of spiralling perplexities…” (Peter Schjeldhal, op. cit., p. 17). The present work is similarly multi-faceted, at once demonstrating Polke’s disruptive painterly style and exemplifying his vast ambition as one of the most innovative artists of our time.