Reconstructing Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock’s Convergence (1952) is one of the American painter’s most famous drippings. It was first published as a jigsaw puzzle in 1964, and has since sold several hundred thousand copies.

Even back then, the puzzle was among the most complicated in the world, despite comprising just 340 pieces. Today, it consists of 1,000 pieces, so failure seems inevitable.

In Reconstructing Jackson Pollock, Volker Renner photographed each piece of the puzzle on canvas and put them in sequence. Instead of assembling the puzzle pieces, he arranges them into a series, characteristic of his working method. The pieces thus become not only an image, but also a metaphor for photography. Indeed, a photograph never represents more than a part of reality as a whole, whose interrelationships are the subject of much discussion, but ultimately remain unresolved—like Pollock’s puzzle.