Film-maker Gautam Ghose and Reimar Volker, the director of Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, inaugurate Music from an Unknown Source at CIMA Gallery. (Amit Datta)

It’s a fortunate proposition for the Calcutta viewer to witness a comprehensive sequence of Sigmar Polke’s works.

The Cologne-based artist/ photographer is a central figure in post-war German art and has been at the cutting-edge of moderne kunste (the modern art movement from 1968 which is “credited with irony, parody and…is audaciously poster-like in style”) with a constantly mutating style, with a marked irreverence for the conventional.

The series of Polker’s 40 gouaches on show at CIMA Gallery, titled Music From An Unknown Source, offers a glimpse into this eclectic artist’s vision. The exhibition, in association with Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, was inaugurated last Friday by film-maker Gautam Ghose, who spoke of Polke’s art as “explaining the inner soul”.

A biting, sardonic wit has always underscore Polke’s work, often hailed as an anarchist trait. He had been one of the founders of the Capitalistic Realism, the anti-art movement which started in Germany in 1963.

The works on display all date back to 1996; much later than the period in which Polke was still discovering his visual language. These gouaches offer a glimpse into the fluid evolution of that idiom; the art surpasses boundaries of a language to morph into symphonic music; of tone, texture, form and figure. The title of the display warrants this process.

Comic strip-like drawings and digitised photograph-like images share wall space with splashes and tonal swirls in this mid-90s series, replete with titles that are often snatches of conversation; perhaps a nod to Dadaist influences. In his curatorial note on the display, Bice Curiger points out Polke setting “traps” that “some interpretations would appear to walk straight into”.

“There, Have A Bit More Caviar, It’s Delicious With The Vodka”, reads one. The corresponding image is of a street scene, a situation which can give rise to a hundred interpretations. The ambiguity of image and title — the latter obviously a lead-in from the artist to coax the viewer into the game of analysis — is deliberate; perhaps a hint at encouraging freedom of thought, from convention, as it were.

Vibrant colours, especially crimson and lilac, a latter-day obsession with the artist, invade some of the “figurative” poster-like works: a family portrait in According To Statistics Every German Owns 10,000 Things.

The figurations are almost surreal, dream-like. The geometry often veers to the chaotic, but converges on a harmonious whole. The social commentary is all-pervasive, albeit always with the humour in place. Even on blatantly sexual themes, like the Sphinx of Sigmund Freud, with a nude man and woman lolling in the foreground, presents a nebula of papercut cards with pop-artesque baby figures on them. The elemental is another recurring motif.

Polke is known to use everyday objects in his work — paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in a single frame. Music From An Unknown Source presents gouaches, where the unique rhythm of Polke’s art finds new expression in a molten, disintegrated cadence.

Given the analogy of music, it is fitting to quote one of Polke’s titles to define this show: “What’s it actually about?” “What do you find in your mouth?” “I find the inside.” “And in the inside?” “In the inside I find the morning”. “Listen, your mouth is made for your ears. Listen.”