Scholarship 2020 - Ksenija Tschetschik-Hammerl, Hasenschleife. Sigmar Polke's Dürer appropriation

Two motifs from the oeuvre of the Nuremberg Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer appear several times in the work of Sigmar Polke. On the one hand, Polke worked with the image of the famous Young Hare (germ. Hase) from the Albertina in Vienna; and on the other, he copied the lines forming loops (germ. sing. Schleife) and curves in Dürer's marginal drawings in the prayer book of Emperor Maximilian and of the large-format woodcut Der Große Triumphwagen (The Large Triumphal Carriage). Sigmar Polke's artistic language, in which heterogeneous motifs, materials and techniques are interwoven and often recur in different contexts, suggests that Dürer’s motifs also relate to each other in his work reflecting a complex and dynamic relationship between the artist and his older colleague. In the present research project, Polke’s selection and use of Dürer's motifs are scrutinized in relation to one another for the first time. It attempts to reconstruct Polke’s appropriation of works by the Nuremberg master as a process of artistic examination spanning several decades.

The method of artistic appropriation is considered one of the most important forms of expression and strategies in modern and postmodern art. The term appropriation art has established itself in art criticism since the ground-breaking New York exhibition Pictures in 1977, which presented works by a number of young American artists. Although the presentational formats of the participating contributions diverged considerably, the imitation of imagery from outside sources characterized all of the projects. The imitation of works of others as well as various appropriations of the ‘foreign’ can already be observed in works by pre-modern artists. In art-historical research, these practices are usually explained as involving learning intentions, commitment to a canon, or motives related to artistic competition. Only rarely are reflexive or critical artistic motivations considered in connection with the imitation practices in older art. In contrast, various forms of imitation and processing of images or other objects created by others in twentieth and twenty-first century art are predominantly interpreted as subversive and critical strategies of expression. The special feature of the art-critical and art-historical reception of Polke’s appropriations of Dürer’s works has so far been that it is characterized by two seemingly contradictory interpretative perspectives, thus creating the impression of a disconcertingly incongruent view of Dürer on the part of Polke.