HYLAND
and sculpture, nearly all of them marked by an almost
delicate, filmy layering of surfaces. The inaugural work
in "Alibis" is the 1963 drawing of Lee Harvey Oswald,
in which Polke manually transformed halftone imagery
lifted from newspapers and magazines, transcribing
matrices of dots onto paper with poster paint and pencil.
With this artisanal process, one the artist returned to
throughout his career, he subverts the authority of the
printed image by deftly inscribing it into a handmade
object, a late modern outpost of what Paul Valery called
"the ancient craft of the Beautiful," and what Walter
Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan), c. 1974/78, Gelatin silver print
© 2014 Estate of Sigmar Polke/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Photo: Alex Jamison
