| Throughout his career
Polke has used newspapers as a source of inspiration in his
work. They have provided subject matter for paintings and drawings,
and have also inspired a technique of imitating the ‘dotted’,
half-tone process of commercial printing. In the mid-1990s Polke
began to work on a new series called Druckfehler, or
‘Printing Mistakes’, inspired by printing errors
found in newspapers. Fascinated by the relationship between
the random mistake and the original image, Polke would enlarge
and manipulate the distorted newsprint. He then paints the image
onto a polyester surface with the aid of a projector, and coats
it in layers of resin. Buried within this elaborate surface
are sheets of gold mesh, creating yet another filter through
which the image must be read. |
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The artist
Printing Mistakes
Gun Culture
Global Imagery
Machine Paintings
Vision and Surveillance
Abstraction and Figuration
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In Salamander Stone (1997) the original printing
mistake has been magnified to the point of complete abstraction,
and floats on a grid of giant dots. The original meaning or function
of this shape has been completely lost, highlighting how easily
misperceptions can occur. This series explores the fragile nature
of perception and the inherent problems of trying to convey fixed
meanings. As the title of Different from Case to Case (1998)
suggests, all words and images are subject to personal interpretation
and visual information is often unreliable.
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