Untitled (Landscape)

Untitled (Landscape) is one Sigmar Polke’s many Rasterbild (raster pattern) paintings, which echo the mechanical printing processes of photography. By using a CMYK color palette (a color-printing model using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) and spraying acrylic paint through a stencil, he created raster-dots that are more visible than the image they make up, undermining the veracity of the mass-produced image. This landscape image, despite being secondary to the raster-dots of the foreground, alludes to 19th-century Romanticist and Impressionist paintings. Untitled (Landscape) explores the relationship between a seemingly soulless, mass-produced future and the romanticized, yet equally fabricated, past.