CHIMERA ART BLOCKS FREE

The traces of everyday life, use, and wear and tear always link Polanszky’s works to the history of the object-like materials used that he transforms into something new, a “pseudo-geometric arrangement,” and that reflects the aesthetics of use. The artist creates assemblages in both a pictorial and a sculptural format that always bear the traces of the past of the materials used.

Polanszky thus seeks a value-free resistance to the adaptive. The artist literally frees them from their previously intended relations of constraint and use.

CHIMERA ART BLOCKS FREE

The works seem like a parody of “refined” materials, while at the same time the formerly used materials are now free of use. Polanszky sees the treatment as a refinement of materials that in our economic system are usually seen as cheap, damaged goods from the hardware store. Traces of Memory between the Fragment and Totality In this way, nature’s creation and the traces inscribed in the material become the DNA of his process-based works. In Polanszky’s Tierstempelbildern (Animal Stamp Paintings), animals like birds, foxes, or martens that the artist consciously attracted with bait left their traces on the pseudo-geometrical compositions and materials placed on the floor of his outdoor studio. Chance, just like the handling and transport damage that Munch also accepted, was part of these changes to the works that are independent of his will and consciousness. But the process of weathering is only controllable to a certain extent. In Munch’s sense, he allows nature to do its work, “to summon quasi-random elements.” As of the 1890s, Munch consciously began subjecting his paintings to the wind and weather, and understood the traces of the elements as part of his art. Some materials, like duplex boards, the artist allows to age outdoors, like Munch subjecting them to the wind and weather until the effects of nature create the right patina and curvature of the board. He finds all his materials as refuse or remains, at scrap metal dealers, construction sites, or in public space, and the traces of prior use and manipulation are always inscribed in the work. With great tenacity, he works with industrially made materials like Plexiglas, foam rubber, Styrofoam, tin, foil, and duplex boards. Rudolf Polanszky’s works are also part of this other history of modernism. Although Munch never abandoned figuration during any of his many phases of development, he was the first artist to attack the material integrity of the artwork with such radicalness, not only by “damaging” his works, but also allowing nature to create with his “kill-or-cure treatment,” even at the risk of the destruction of the works themselves.

Not only was the decisive importance of materiality recognized by modernist art, the physical properties of the works themselves were now assigned a significance. The importance of material in art has shifted profoundly in the twentieth century. He is a key link in what Monika Wagner has described as a material-based “other history of modernism,” a line of development leading from William Turner, Gustave Courbet, through Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque, to Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, Emil Schumacher, and Jackson Pollock. Munch’s physical attack against the painting and the destruction of its surface were as unorthodox as his application of paint and his radical experiments with the material and the impact of the wind and weather on his works. yes, with time, it might turn out to be quite good.”

“Just wait until a few rain showers have passed over it, or it gets a few tears from nails and whatnot and has been transported in all kinds of miserable boxes. He would jump at them, tear them apart, kick them.” Munch understood this “damage” as an integral part of his way of working, and in so doing included the constant possibility of the failure of his “kill-or-cure treatment” on a conceptual level. “On occasion, Munch quite simply fought with his pictures.

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