The Museum of Modern Art's ambitious 2014 retrospective of the German artist Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) encompassed much of his peripatetic travels from medium to medium but stinted on the ravishing, unsettling, sometimes abject beauty that is strongest in his paintings.
"Eine Winterreise," at David Zwirner, corrects that shortcoming. Organized by Vicente Todolí, it's a complete knockout of 31 works on canvas, printed fabric, clear plastic and semitransparent polyester, most of them dating from the 1980s. The show's title, which translates as "A Winter’s Journey," nods toPolke's travels during the 1980s to climes tropical and chilly that affected his subject matter and sense of color.
The works here highlight an apparent inability to make a bad painting, or at least a talent for ones whose loose but indelible touch, bracing wit and slapdash pictorial wizardry consistently taunt us with that possibility.
They also demonstrate Polke's indifference to any division between representation and abstraction, and his unwavering devotion to experimental materials and techniques. "Night Cap I" (1986), a dark, precipitous mountainscape that is also a Color Field stain painting, uses only indigo and alcohol varnish.
Light—rays, orbs, splashes and other emanations—is the driving concernhere, announced by the shimmering "Moonlit Landscape With Reeds" (1969) in the first gallery. With a brilliant moon overlooking a watery horizon formed by the seam joining two patterned fabrics, it is, like so much in Polke's work, an exultation in quick, scanty brush work. Light is especially palpable in "Magic Lantern (Earth and Moon)," a miniseries of six two-sided paintings on semitransparent polyester rarely exhibited in this country that tell a storybook tale of astral travel, and havoc, in stained-glass colors. This show proceeds at top speed to the end.