Since the early 1960s, German artist Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) had been concerned with the relationship between reality and the visual, between art and everyday life. In doing so, he often adopted a detached, ironic stance that allowed him to focus on the form and material nature of painting, in addition to questions of content.
The exhibition ‘Music of Unexplainable Origin’ offers an insight into his work, which occupies a unique place in the contemporary art world and is one of the most important works of post-war German art.
Through the works in the exhibition, Polke takes the nature of water gouaches as his starting point to thematise the dripping and flowing of paint, the controlled and uncontrolled occurrence of physical phenomena.
As a counterpoint to the unpredictability of the flowing trail of paint, the artist places a regular, predictable grid system.
He also provides the images with absurd-sounding titles that give a poetic voice to what is depicted, which is exemplary of Polke’s overall artistic stance.