GERHARD RICHTER, (B. 1932)
GERHARD RICHTER, (B. 1932)

Abstraktes Bild

Details
GERHARD RICHTER, (B. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild
signed, dated and numbered 'Richter, '81, 464/1' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
19.5/8 x 21¾in. (50 x 55.3cm.)
Literature
"Gerhard Richter Bilder Paintings 1962-1985", Cologne 1986, no. 464/1, p. 237 (illustrated).
"Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1993", III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, no. 464-1 (illustrated in colour).

Lot Essay

Beginning in the late 1970s, Richter found in the abstract format an honesty of means that enabled him to further the essentially paradoxical nature of his art towards the suggestion of a new reality. Richter has stated that he sees his abstract paintings as "metaphors in their own right, pictures that are about a possibility of co-existence" and that all he is trying to do is "to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom. No Paradises." ("Gerhard Richter - Writings 1962-93." p. 166).

Richter's 'Abstract Paintings' are fictious 'models' that, as he puts it, "make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. We denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the infinite. And for thousands of years we have been depicting it through surrogate images such as heaven and hell, gods and devils." (op. cit.) Richter's 'Abstracts' are works that playfully deal with the archetypal and Romantic concepts of the absolute, the sublime and the void. "In abstract painting", Richter asserts, "we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualisable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the most visual immediacy - all of the resources of art in fact - in order to depict 'nothing'." (ibid., p. 100.)

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