Sigmar Polke & Cosima von Bonin
Small but mighty, or perhaps…huge and mighty? The exhibition is only located in one room of the Stedelijk, in the honour gallery. Who has been there before knows that this room does not disappoint in size and neither did the works exhibited in it. Made by two German artists, Sigmar Polke and Cosima von Bonin, they were equally impressive in magnitude and yet, relative simplicity. With little explanations accompanying the artworks, it was nice to wander around the room and find a common thread running through them.
Sigmar Polke’s Farbatafeln, which all span several meters in height and width, were made as part of his interest in colours as a chemical compound in the 1980s. He took rare pigments that are used in the creation of paints and put them on these canvasses in their pure form. This means that they are destined to change and shift over time, hence the colours we’re perceiving today might not be the same ones starring back at Polke when he completed the paintings 40 years ago. In this way he was harkening back to times where art and science weren’t two distinct disciplines, but rather informed each other. Maybe art is not a purely aesthetic pursuit and can benefit from a deeper understanding of science for innovations in processes and techniques. Equally, science can benefit from creativity in finding new angles to explore from.
The large-scale canvasses were accompanied by an assortment of mushroom sculptures in the middle of the room. These are not just some ordinary mushrooms, but enormous ones many times the size of their real-life equivalents. Standing beside them I felt even more dwarfed than normal and drawing a line from Polke to von Bonin, one could say the mushrooms are an invitation to change one’s perspective of the world and surpass the limits of our minds. Similarly to Polke, von Bonin could also be challenging the boundaries we draw between nature and art: To what extent is art influenced by the natural world and how is our understanding of that world shaped by the cultural artefacts we create?