"Polke's work frequently juxtaposes images wrenched from different periods of history. At the bottom left he makes use of a collage by the early twentieth-century Surrealist Max Ernst, whilst the central image derives from a satirical etching...
"According to the artist this painting depicted an 'ideological discussion'. As such it evokes the stormy realist-abstraction debates, and allied political differences, among artists in Italy after the Second World War. Stylistically, the work...