Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba as part of the 14th edition of the Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba
March 31—June 19, 2022
„There’s always a pecking order“, says Dagmar Steffen and straightens up the butter knife, gouache, 100 x 70 cm, photographer: Frank Kleinbach © Frank Kleinbach, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
According to statistics every German owns 10,000 things. Gouache, 100 x 70 cm, photographer: Frank Kleinbach, © Frank Kleinbach, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Flower water will not smell if you add a piece of charcoal. Gouache, 100 x 70 cm, photographer: Frank Kleinbach, © Frank Kleinbach, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Using such laughably simple words like ..., gouache, 100 x 70 cm, photographer: Frank Kleinbach, © Frank Kleinbach, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Most highly valued are the ones whose scent only spreads a few centimetres around them, gouache, 100 x 70 cm, photographer: Frank Kleinbach, © Frank Kleinbach, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
How long is a metre?, gouache, 100 x 70 cm, photographer: Frank Kleinbach, © Frank Kleinbach, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
An exhibition by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)
More info on the ifa website: English | German
The 14th edition of the Havana Biennial proposes once again the difficult challenge of deciphering our reality, through artistic projects that establish a platform of reflection on the development of civilization, considering art as a plural and decentralized space. The ifa was invited by curator and art historian Tereza de Arruda to participate with its exhibition "Sigmar Polke. Music from an Unknown Source". For Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) has been dealing with the relationship between pictorial reality and reality since the early 1960s. The controlled and uncontrollable ‘letting happen’ of physical phenomena played an important role in Polke’s work. The 40 gouaches of the exhibition document the dripping and flowing of paint. Polke laid a strict grid over the unpredictable flow of paint. This antithesis of chance and structure is characteristic of his work.
40 gouaches with a format of 70 x 100 cm, all dating from the year 1996, are the core of Sigmar Polke's exhibition bearing the name 'Music from an Unknown Source'. These pictures give insight into an artistic oeuvre which has a singular position in the contemporary art scene of today and belongs among the most significant of the German postwar era.
Since the early 1960s, Sigmar Polke, born in Oels in Silesia (then German, now part of Poland) in 1941, has been concerned with the relationship of the reality as contained in a picture and reality itself, the relation between art and daily life. In regard to this, he often takes an ironical position of some distance to things, which enables him to turn his attention – above and beyond issues of content – to the form and the material nature of painting.
In the gouaches of this exhibition, Polke makes the dripping and flowing of paint his theme, originating from the character of the watery gouaches. The controlled and uncontrolled 'allowing to happen' of physical phenomena plays an important role for Polke. Over the unpredictable flow of paint, the artist lays a regular and predictable screen system as an antipole – something very characteristic of him. Moreover, he gives the pictures titles that sound absurd, which in turn expand what has been presented in them, thus adding a poetic note, and which are exemplary in terms of Polke's stance as an artist.
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba [visit website]
Havana, Cuba
Exhibition period: March 31–June 19, 2022