TIRANA, Jan. 15 – Sigmar Polke, one of the most important artists of post-war Germany is being featured in Albania for the first time in an exhibition exploring “music from an unknown source.”
The exhibition which opened this week at the National Art Gallery in Tirana with the support of the German embassy showcases forty gouaches, a method of painting using colours that are mixed with water and made thick with a type of glue, all dating from the year 1996.
Forty gouaches with a format of 70 x 100 cm, all dating from the year 1996, are the core of Sigmar Polke’s exhibition named ‘Music from an Unknown Source’. These pictures give insight into an artistic oeuvre which has a singular position in the contemporary art scene of today and belongs among the most significant of the German postwar era, curators say.
Since the early 1960s, Sigmar Polke, born in Oels in Silesia (now part of Poland) in 1941, has been concerned with the relationship of the reality as contained in a picture and reality itself, the relation between art and daily life. In regard to this, he often takes an ironical position of some distance to things, which enables him to turn his attention – above and beyond issues of content – to the form and the material nature of painting.
In the gouaches of this exhibition, Polke makes the dripping and flowing of paint his theme, originating from the character of the watery gouaches. The controlled and uncontrolled ‘allowing to happen’ of physical phenomena plays an important role for Polke. Over the unpredictable flow of paint, the artist lays a regular and predictable screen system as an antipole – something very characteristic of him. Moreover, he gives the pictures titles that sound absurd, which in turn expand what has been presented in them, thus adding a poetic note, and which are exemplary in terms of Polke’s stance as an artist.
The exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Tirana will stay open until 22 February 2015.
