Instant Stratification

If there was a recipe to the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s newest exhibit, it’d probably go something like this: Take an onion. Flatten it. Enlarge it a thousand times. Add every color and texture. Bake at 350º. Let cool for five to 40 years, then try to find the original layers of the onion again.

No easy feat, right? At their best, the strikingly unique paintings and sculptures in “Stratification” challenge viewers to look for similarly hard-to-find layers. Drawn out of the museum’s archives, these seven pieces from contemporary German-speaking Europe feature concepts of “layering,” according to the exhibit description. But all too often, they come across as mere tricks of the eye.

The primary piece for the gallery, Sigmar Polke’s “Untitled,” is an abstract painting with a variety of coats, some opaque, some translucent. Buried in these layers of the canvas are a collage of intentional marks, chaotic paint splatter, and textures both smooth and wrinkled. It confuses at first, but each new look brings out a new detail, or stratum.

George Richter’s “Said” and Georg Baselitz’s “Triangle” turn a usually simple medium­—oil on canvas—into a workout for your retinas. One can’t help but struggle to shift the focus from the painting’s surface to what is below, over and over again. At over two-and-a-half meters high each, both paintings are bold, bursting with color and texture. The physical material of the paint seems to extend off of the canvas towards the viewer, while the colors seep into the depths under the surface.

Needless to say, most of these paintings actively involve the viewer, making them more accessible and appealing for the most casual and uneducated of museum-goers. But not all of the works really fit the theme of layering, and many aren’t even visually enthralling.

Apparently, Rudolf de Crignis’s untitled work—a huge square canvas of solid blue paint—has a mildly interesting backstory. He allegedly coated it repeatedly with different blues and greens in multiple textures and directions. But at the end of the day, it’s just a big blue quadrangle with very little to offer outside of the story behind its creation. If a piece can’t transcend its parentage to succeed on its own merits, who needs it?

Its neighbor, Richard Paul Lohse’s “15 Serial Rows of Equal Amounts of Color with Bright Emphasis,” is just as coldly calculated as its name suggests. Ultimately, it lacks any real layered effect other than the optical illusion created by the ROY G. BIV rows of squares, which has been done too often to really posses the necessary visceral force.

The collection atones for some of these missteps with the inclusion of two fascinating sculptures, the first being Thomas Lenk’s “Stratification 21a.” The title may sound more like a math class than a work of art, but the piece has an appeal that transcends mere mathematical experimentation. Lenk has created a vertically arranged “toppled domino” effect of black squares that twist back behind themselves, creating the most literal manifestation of the exhibit’s title.

The other highlight is Max Bill’s “Endless Surface in the Form of a Column,” a gold-plated bronze Mobius-Strip that pushes the concepts of layering to their most experimental extremes. The piece is sure to captivate you, even if only because the glare will catch your eye from across the room. The piece is aesthetically gripping, with sleek design and obvious challenges to traditional definitions of stratification.

The collection is a series of conflicts—the works are not at all intimidating to look at, yet they require multiple appraisals; the shifting perceptions can offer completely opposite views of the work, and characteristics of the idea of layering do not always conform.

But ultimately, even if some of the pieces are too half-baked to win any artistic “Iron Chef” competitions, “Stratification” presents a rare opportunity to interact with dynamic works of art.

“Stratification” runs through Feb. 26.

—Staff writer Bari M. Schwartz can be reached at bschwart@fas.harvard.edu.