Sigmar Polke's art has a look of buoyant, light-hearted making that does not readily reveal its great depth of substance, the acuity of its analytical approach, and the compass of its artistic ambitions. Polke's project is utterly and completely visual. Over the past decades, seeing and the attendant incorporation of all relevant modes of seeing,of all apparatus with their phantasmagoric potential have fed into a project of anthropological proportions. The courage and the penchant for "shabbiness," as in the child-like, scribbled ballpoint drawings of the sixties, prefigure the artist's urgent concerns and his quest for essentials. Playfulness and a lack of gravity cloak an intensely penetrating gaze. Traces on paper or canvas cunningly keep tabs on all the associations that are brought into play in the process of creating.
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