.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Galerie (1967) was a gift from Gerhard Richter to the musicologist Ludgar Schäfer. Schäfer, employed in the artist's Düsseldorf studio during the early 1970's, became a close friend, witnessing the creation of some of Richter's most prominent materpieces from the serene Alpine mountainscapes and the conceptually-based Colour Charts of the late 1960s, to the breathtaking Cloud Paintings and the artist's initial experiments with abstraction in the early 1970s.
Executed between a large series of Colour Chart paintings and the return to his signature photo-realist style, Galerie was created during one of Richter's periods of diversified artistic experimentation. This small but intriguing investigation into the representation of interior space portrays the famous Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf where Richter had his first one-man exhibition in 1964.
'I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information....All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts'.
(ed. H. U. Obrist, Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practise of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 37).
Executed between a large series of Colour Chart paintings and the return to his signature photo-realist style, Galerie was created during one of Richter's periods of diversified artistic experimentation. This small but intriguing investigation into the representation of interior space portrays the famous Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf where Richter had his first one-man exhibition in 1964.
'I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information....All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts'.
(ed. H. U. Obrist, Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practise of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 37).