“[Sibirische Glasmeteoriten I (Siberian Glass Meteorites I)] is a museum-quality piece that...reveals to us a subject matter that was at heart to the artist: Meteors. The phenomenon of meteorites was crucial to Sigmar Polke and fascinated as he was by those cosmic elements, he was very well informed about their places of origin, their magical powers and properties…”
A formidable rendering of four meteorite rocks suspended against a resinous field, Sibirische Glasmeteoriten I (Siberian Glass Meteorites I) typifies Sigmar Polke’s affinity for unorthodox media and his career-long enchantment with space and alchemy. Executed in 1988, this vast canvas is a powerful exemplar of Polke’s dynamic mature corpus in which he moved into fascinatingly unpredictable dominions of creative experimentation. Signifying a disruptive upending of painterly conventions, acrylic and natural resin arrestingly coalesce in Sibirische Glasmeteoriten I to invoke the mysteries of primordial forces and eras.
Compellingly evoking a profound mysticism, Siberian Glass Meteorites I conveys Sigmar Polke’s noted fascination with alchemy as a system of understanding nature without recourse to positivistic science. Glass meteorites, such as those depicted, are forged from the fusion of rock and soil that is liquified by the energy of terrestrial meteorite impacts. Artifacts of the ancient past, these glass meteorites endure from impacts that occurred in Siberia tens of millions of years in the past. Such cosmic associations imbue glass meteorites with mystical and alchemical properties among some, establishing them as an ideal subject matter for Polke. Concurrent with his use of meteorite dust as an artistic medium, the artist heightens his reverence for this substance by wielding it as the subject of this ambitious canvas.
Siberian Glass Meteorites I stands at the pinnacle among Polke’s resinous works, a process the artist honed throughout the 1980s by which the traditional opaque surface of canvas is made semitransparent by coating canvas in thick layers of resin. Thus, the present work is archetypal of Polke’s playful experimentation whereby an emphasis on qualities of light and transparency permeate his work. Lusciously pigmented primary colors with varied tonalities wash over the glassy translucence of the coated support, a technique allusive of the apprenticeship Polke undertook in a Dusseldorf stained-glass factory. By contrast, the thick black lines that construct the contours and texture of the dramatically shaped meteorites are rendered in a graphic style reminiscent of newspaper illustrations, creating a prominent imprint upon our perceptive field. Bleeding beyond the outlines of these forms, the paint emits a glowing aura in the pictorial space. Through these manipulations of light, Polke masterfully renders the partial transparence naturally inherent to such glass meteorites. Destabilizing the very idea of prescriptive pictorial modes, the unconventional ground of the present work makes way for captivating ocular phenomena as the meteorites appear to float freely, almost cosmically, in the imagined amber-tinged atmosphere of the present work.
Siberian Glass Meteorites I supremely emblemizes Sigmar Polke’s forging of a painterly language that was utterly unique in its embrace of innovative artistic ideas and the technical boundaries of what art can achieve. Featuring a subject matter wholly unique in his oeuvre yet directly reflective of his cosmic obsessions and representations of contemporary media, the present work is a resplendent triumph of his fundamentally revolutionary and anti-conventional nature in which he eludes association with conventional art historical movements in favor of an extraordinarily eclectic stylistic language.
Enduring in its impact, Siberian Glass Meteorites I embodies Polke’s inestimable artistic ambition and subversive attitude to otherworldly effect. Birte Kleeman, Director of Michael Werner Gallery, affirms, “This is a museum-quality piece that – besides its beauty and combination of several important ideas Polke explored during his lifet.mes – reveals to us a subject matter that was at heart to the artist: Meteors. The phenomenon of meteorites was crucial to Sigmar Polke and fascinated as he was by those cosmic elements, he was very well informed about their places of origin, their magical powers and properties…he started to integrate mineral material and other substances into his artwork. Siberian Meteorites plays with the materiality of the phenomena (of amber) by way of using artificial resin and other chemical processes in its creation.”
