Vertreter (Stand-In)
Artist
Sigmar Polke
(German, 1941–2010)
Date2002
Mediuminkjet print on polyester
Dimensions127.5 x 221.6 cm (50 3/16 x 87 1/4 in.)
ClassificationsPrints
Credit LineHelen Sagoff Slosberg Fund
Object number2003.43
Label TextAcknowledging that no image exists in isolation, Sigmar Polke was adept at the orchestrated recycling of images and stylistic conventions from kitsch to modernist abstraction, always wanting us to think about how things existed in the world before they entered into his pictures. Polke not only diverted an image from its previous function and meaning but also anticipated our tendency to see it as a stand-in for an original. Vertreter demonstrates how Polke juxtaposed and layered pictures within a picture, resulting in a characteristically unpredictable hybrid of abstraction (part monochrome, part pattern) and representation (scavenged photos of anonymous workers and a cryptic cartoon). In a similar spirit of eluding any one definition, Polke featured the red outline of a usually invisible and merely functional component of a picture—a painting stretcher (he made transparent paintings in which the stretcher becomes part of the image). Or might this double rectangle represent a window frame, acting as a subtle reminder that the traditional function of art as a “window” onto the world no longer applies to art like Polke’s, which acts more as an archive of cultural debris?
ProvenanceElias Fine Art, Allston, MAOn View
Not on view
2015; printed 2021
2014; printed 2021
