Eclectic or confused? Andrew Graham-Dixon on a new show at the Saatchi Gallery
IT'S HARD to make sense of the Saatchi Collection. The latest exhibition to fill (or at least make an impression on) the vast, gleaming white expanses of the Saatchis' gallery in St John's Wood seems a willed exercise in incongruity.
Joel Shapiro's post-Minimal, stick-figure sculptures compete for attention with Leon Golub's mural-scale meditations on man's inhumanity to man. Late, car-toon-like Philip Gustons neighbour the pictorial regurgitations of Sigmar Polke, West German art's borrower-in-chief. It gives the impression that the Saatchis are flaunting the hold-all capa-ciousness of their taste.
Polke's work seems most at home in this mix 'n' match selec-tion. His art, with its chameleon-like impersonations of different styles, its fickle switches of tech-nique and subject matter (land-scape, figure, abstract — name it and he's painted it) finds room, like the Saatchis themselves, for a little of everything.
Polke has a big reputation. He was Golden Lionised at the last Venice Biennale, along with Frank Auerbach (they shared that event's best-in-show award). His chief theme seems to be the breakdown of visual categories, in a world where we are bombarded daily by a chaotic mass of un-sortcd, unsolicited images. His paintings force competing images and styles into uneasy cohabita¬tion with couldn't-care-less aban¬don. Polke paints a gaggle of Bunny Girls in a grungy pointillist style that seems to poke fun, in equal measure, at Seurat and at Roy Lichtenstein's Pop classics; he daubs a ghostly, skeletal figure on some scraps of fake fur and discontinued furnishing fabric. Polkc-dots rub shoulders with Polke-geists, in a Babel of images where none seems to deserve, or gain, precedence.
The younger Polke's world-weary retailing of consumer-orientated imagery carried a politi¬cal charge. His earlier paintings degloss or deface advertising im-agery, documenting his cynicism...
