The Arts Club of Chicago
201 E Ontario St
312.787.3997
This event has passed.
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Sigmar Polke: Lens Paintings, installation view. Courtesy Arts Club of Chicago
- When
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Jan 23, 2009 – Apr 17, 2009
Mondays–Fridays (11am–6pm)
- Where
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- Price
One of the giants of post-war painting, Sigmar Polke is an irreverant experimentalist — an artist of many moves whose work defies categorization. The works in his recent Lens Paintings are themselves varied in style, but they all employ a similar device: a corrugated sheet of clear plastic covers each canvas and functions as both a distorting lens and another stratum for paint. In some works, glossy fields of color obscure what's underneath, but most are complexly layered, incorporating, say, old printed illustrations replicated by hand or large collage-like tracts of patterned fabric. Meanwhile the lenses stir up a series of perceptual tricks, creating a hint of animation or unsettling the dynamic of figure and ground.
