The Prado Museum of Madrid takes up contemporary art with Sigmar Polke's look at Goya

Three decades ago, a decree determined that 1881, the birth of Picasso, would divide the collections of the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía. However, the Prado has not wanted to give up the great contemporary art that draws from its own collections. Two years ago, it organized an exhibition on Fernando Zóbel, who spent long days at the Prado and was inspired by its masters for his abstract paintings. And now it's Sigmar Polke's turn (1941-2010), one of the great painters of the second half of the 20th century who was fascinated by Goya. So much so that he dreamed of putting together a Polke-Goya exhibition at the Prado, which has finally come to fruition.

The director of the Madrid art gallery, Miguel Falomir, pointed out that the presence of contemporary art in the museum will not be “an afterthought”. “It is not a contemporary art museum, there are magnificent ones in Madrid, but it cannot ignore those contemporary artists for whom the Prado or the artists best represented in it were decisive,” he stressed.

Sigmar Polke. Unveiled Affinities - curated by Gloria Moure, who dreamed up the exhibition with the German artist, who was his friend - shows the complicity of Polke with Goya starting from an almost magical discovery. Polke, “a creator who, in the face of the vicissitudes of the 20th century, defended the banner of painting,” says Moure, was fascinated by Goya's painting Old Women or The Time (1810-12), which is now on display in the exhibition from the Lille Museum. A stark canvas presided over by a lady and a queen exquisitely dressed. However, the faces of the women, who gaze at themselves in a mirror, are almost like skulls, treated, according to the curator, “very closely to what the black paintings will be.” Behind the women, a winged Saturn threatens them with the fact that time is running out.

Always interested in the ghostly nature of painting, in the sedimentation of time and memory in the layers of the paintings, Polke requested the X-ray of Old Women. And he discovered much more than he expected: “He saw a previous canvas that Goya had recovered, in which there was a resurrection. And what Goya paints on it is a premonition, a warning that time is running out for you. This overlay of concepts reaffirmed in Polke the idea that painting, especially European painting, is not the surface, it is not the appearance, it is everything it condenses. His idea of painting is density, memory, layers”.

And his encounter with this painting led him to work on different aspects of it. In the exhibition, through his language, there are works close to the iconography of the canvas, such as the ghosts, the queen's chair, the jewels, the mirror. And there is a whole series dedicated to the French Revolution, which unifies the falls of stable worlds that Goya and Polke experienced, and with which the figure of Saturn is related, who “in Polke is an uncontrollable, diabolical figure, the colossus, the giant, and also the god of instability.” In the exhibition, both Goya's The Colossus and Polke's gigantic figures are present.

“Sigmar,” Moure concludes, “experienced the trials and tribulations of post-war Germany, first in the eastern part, then in the western part. He experienced both regimes, which turned him into a free thinker. He also witnessed the fall of the wall, a time of absolute change. Changes also in the ways of understanding, like the theory of catastrophes from the sixties. He read it and said: this is what I am doing. A world where uncertainty is neither positive nor negative, it just is, and must be embraced. The collapse of a stable world connects him with Goya, who defended the enlightenment in a reactionary Spain that tried not to be contaminated by new ways of seeing.”