Sigmar Polke

In 2006, German painter Sigmar Polke (b. 1941) started to mimic the shifting optical effects of lenticular images. In lenticulars, currently visible in Coraline posters throughout the city, the picture “magically” changes as you change your vantage point. But the 34 works in “Lens Paintings,” which Polke has never shown outside Germany before, are more likely to evoke a “huh?” than a “how’d he do that?”

Polke is one of his country’s most important postwar artists. Along with Gerhard Richter, he cofounded Capitalist Realism, a German variant of Pop Art. He’s been justly praised for his experiments with chemicals and surface materials one doesn’t normally associate with visual art; they’re what make his innovative layering of found images and abstract forms possible. Polke’s “Lens Paintings” have so many of the ingredients of his success, it’s disappointing how few of them work.

The corrugated sheet of plastic that the artist incorporates into each painting doesn’t function as well as a real lenticular. In a typical piece, an untitled large-scale painting from 2007, the translucent layer just distorts the multicolored fabric beneath it without making the static pattern seem to move. Polke uses the plastic itself as a canvas, covering it with a cartoonish portrait of Lady Godiva on her horse, a streetscape and abstract splotches of brightly colored paint. This is a more intriguing combination of images than the paint drips and fragments of European engravings (which Polke has already borrowed for years) that dominate the show. The best “Lens Paintings” are very handsome, but we’d hoped for something groundbreaking.

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