Large Head, 1979

About the Work

Anyone viewing this complex work by Sigmar Polke gradually becomes aware of the intertwining of subjects and artistic techniques. The 'Large Head' seems to be immersed in a disconcerting multiplicity of colours and design effects, which reveal how the artist quotes and deliberately alienates different artistic styles of the modern age as well as trivial pictorial worlds.

The dominant grey look of the head gives the impression of an exhausted rebel. The picture could have been developed from a reportage photograph in a daily newspaper. We see a young man who has covered his hair with a cloth and whose head is inclined sideways. His eyes are closed and he appears to be daydreaming, with a cigarette between his lips. Polke has inserted a possible fantasy image into the visual field, like an ironic comment. The figural scene shows two young couples sitting together convivially at a table and turning expectantly towards a waitress who is serving them cocktails on a tray. This 1960s-style illustration shows an example of carefree leisure time in post-war Germany, when the economy was stable. In 1979 Polke also used it for a stencil print in his painting 'Rotation' (Deutsche Bank). Here, in 'Large Head', he employs this pictorial quotation as a mirror-image cut-out. This technique breaks up the two-dimensional surface and offers the image plane beneath it as a glimpse inside the head, so to speak. Once again we see, as a quotation from a drawing, the stencilled black outline of a hand holding an open pair of scissors - a reference to the author's own artistic action. This detail is located in a painterly pictorial context hinted at by the vibrant blue, which, together with a radiant yellow and red, also appears elsewhere in the cut-out.

The viewer is transported into a qualitatively different level of perception, because now he no longer finds any reference to figural images of reality, but rather an allusion to contemporary art by the likes of Willem de Kooning. The watery blue splashes which melancholically veil the head - which in turn reminds us of Andy Warhol - are a reference to Sam Francis. And the two-dimensional yellow and green areas in the bottom corners of the work recall Colour Field painting. Polke's playful treatment of the different styles of American painting and his ironic look at art and society, which also contains an element of self-mockery, emphasise the subtle dissociation of the German artist from his international contemporaries.