Madrid,
Miguel Falomir has explained more than once that the Prado is not a contemporary art museum, but that he cannot turn his back on the artists who are and who have taken influence from their collections in their artistic work. After Fernando Zóbel, it is now Sigmar Polke who awaits us in rooms C and D of temporary exhibitions of the art gallery, in a project, curated by Gloria Moure, that was already longed for by this author during his lifetime.
The German painter and the Spanish art historian met in the eighties, collaborated on two exhibitions and, in 2005, Moure dedicated a monographic publication to him. During those decades, both talked about The old ones either time by Goya (1810-1812) and about the possibility of organizing an exhibition around Polke’s studies on this image in the same Prado, whose collections this creator, often associated with pop art, was enthusiastic about in that same decade of the eighties: his daughter Anna Polke recalled today that she visited his rooms very often during a six-week stay in Madrid; Later he would stop at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille and delve deeper into this Goyesque work, The old oneswhich we can now see for the first time in Spain along with an x-ray that would provide the German author with multiple ideas.
Like his good friend Blinky Palermo, with whom he shared a generation, he defended the pictorial discipline from a deep knowledge of its history; He was able to experience first-hand a period of great changes in his country (from World War II to the division and the fall of the wall) and became a free thinker, early aware that the European upheavals of the 20th century implied changes in the ways of looking and knowing and that, in that panorama, the individual was not an isolated entity, but an agent of change, a participant in it. Moure has pointed out today that both Goya and Polke knew times in which an established world and culture were falling and others were yet to arrive, and they noticed that transition with an unusual clarity, a circumstance that would unite them together with their interest in the phantasmagorical and ambiguous. , for death and humor.
What is the first individual of the German artist in Madrid is based, therefore, on the weight in some of his works of that Goyaesque composition of The old onesboth in its theme and in terms of techniques and compositional procedures: the X-ray analysis of this painting determines that its canvas was reused and that a Resurrection had previously been executed on it; This procedure was, as is known, very common for practical reasons, but Polke wanted to extract readings about the relationship of the warning – about time running out – in the final Goyesque image with the motif of the Resurrection and with his own notion of painting as a medium open to density, memory and superposition. We can understand, thus, that the projection of the Aragonese onto the German also took place in several layers: in relation to the character and his circumstances, with the iconography of The old ones and with the invoice for this same painting. Taking into account the complexity of these ties, this exhibition does not follow chronological criteria, but rather concepts.
Such was the impact that these decrepit old of Goya exercised on Polke who photographed certain parts of the canvas subjected to He appreciated in them the reinforcement of his consideration of the work of art as a phenomenological fact, rather than as a closed reality. In reality, he investigated this painting in depth: he delved into the jewels worn by the lady in white, especially the arrow sheltered in her hair; the bulky earrings and the also bulky wigs that hide their baldness; and he delved into the furniture of the scene: the chair and the inquisitorial mirror will be present in some of his creations.
And special mention deserves the figure of Saturn, whom the German focused on from both a mythological and astronomical perspective – as an emblem of chance, time and celebration, of role reversal (the carnival is an important festival in Cologne, where he lived and died) – and the signature of the Spanish painter, which Polke enlarged in his photocopies and which is linked to the methods by which he was seen in his works: through lines, his own hand or a planet new, yours.
Compositions await us in the Prado where skulls, bones or sharp-eyed eyes would most likely refer to the tragedy of the Holocaust, but also to the Goyesque influence of The old ones or of The disasters of waras Ashes upon ashes (with skulls half buried in white pigment) u white obeliskin which these representations remain on a black background on which a monument floats without inscriptions; also a triptych in which ghostly faces emerge from layers of artificial resin, which accentuates their evanescence. This piece is a sum of ambiguities: those derived from the depth that the rectangular openings seem to announce, the opposite effect generated by the light backgrounds and the superposition of chromatic layers and the ties between the work and Goya’s production; not only The old onesalso the majas on the balcony of San Antonio de la Florida.
The figure of Paganini, to whom a pact with Faust was attributed, inspired Polke to create a large-format and complex composition of the same title: on a printed fabric he superimposed an engraving by Boilly about a dream by Tartini, another violinist who was They claimed relations with the devil. Swastikas emerge, like musical notes, dark echoes of the disasters of the German war, while a whirlwind of skulls is not far from the clouds of the X-ray of The old onesnor the violinist devil, of the figure of Saturn, both in its scale and in its iconicity.
This is how one sits correctly (from Goya and Max Ernst)made from printed fabrics on which dispersed paint was placed, clearly replicates the Whim 26, the mistake They already have a seatin which two girls hold chairs upside down over their heads while raising their petticoats as if they were hoods; They give rise to a world upside down that can be associated with carnivals. The figures combine Goyaesque features with those of an Ernst engraving to A week of bontéalthough this double origin matters less than the iconological depth of those appealed creators; the surrealist will be so more than once along the way.
The empire-style dress of the most melancholic woman of the two mercilessly portrayed by Goya, to which the most luminous area of that painting corresponds, seems to be invoked in oil stain (1983), an image in which Polke interspersed pieces of gold foil, while in Woman in the mirrora symbol of the idealization derived from consumerism, that mirror made of glass can lead us to the one that, in the work of Fuendetodos, asks the elderly women how they are. Another, made with synthetic resin and lacquer on polyester, awaits us in See things as they are: The title of this piece is written as a reflection in an impossible mirror, as an inverted text. Several references here are directed to Magritte: the artist seems to pay tribute to the poetic nature of painting as opposed to its realism.
big man and black man They constitute two prominent colossi articulated through color and overlapping planes (the one attributed to Goya has been brought to this exhibition), while in China Seamade with synthetic resin and violet pigment, the color range seems to prevail over the motifs – swimmers struggling in a rough sea – and in Catastrophe theory II and IVwhich we can safely associate with the black paintsPolke takes us, not only to an imperishable indeterminacy of the real; also to an unpredictable landscape of which we are part.
“Sigmar Polke. “Elective affinities”
NATIONAL PRADO MUSEUM
Paseo del Prado, s/n
Madrid
From November 25, 2024 to March 16, 2025
