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Lot Essay
Painted in 1971, Ausschnitt (Kreutz) absorbs the viewer with its swirls of seemingly abstract paint. The colors and shapes blend and bend like slow and restless troubled liquids. However, the apparent abstraction is itself deceptive, for Ausschnitt (Kreutz) is in reality a painting of a blown-up detail of the paint on Richter's palette. The shapes that we see are the vastly magnified mixings of paint, of brushstrokes from one of Richter's most important tools.
Nothing could be more painterly than the surface of a palette, with its smeared oils spread by the brush in different, arbitrary directions. The nature of mixing paints with the brush is such that the palette is devoid of image, of intended shapes or figures in the paint. It is an abstract painting on panel, the by-product of art. Yet here it has been granted a remarkable apotheosis--the colors, so vivid and yet mixing into one another, have a humble beauty of their own while still on the palette, and Richter has taken this, recognized its quality and magnified it in order to create something larger and more beautiful. The paint on the palette is completely abstract, an inadvertent action painting in miniature and yet, because Richter has photographed it and then reproduced it in oils, he has paradoxically produced something completely figurative. Ausschnitt (Kreutz) is essentially a hyperrealist still life. All of Richter's art involves some struggle against or play within the boundaries of art and painting. Nowhere is this more true than in these 'detail' paintings, where chance forms become figurative, where the tools which provide the medium for the artwork are themselves the subject matter. This is a painting of paint, about painting.
Richter painted a small series of Ausschnitt (Kreutz) paintings during the early 1970s. In some ways, these were the first photo-paintings that Richter created that truly revealed his love of the act of painting. In this work, disguised by its scale to those who do not know what it treats, Richter has raised the status of his humble painter's implements. Ausschnitt (Kreutz) therefore appears as a work of veneration, of worship, Richter already betraying the emotional attachment to his subject matter that early on he dogmatically denied but which now he openly admits has guided much of his artistic development. Richter is a painter, is obsessed with painting, and loves painting despite, and even because of, painting's limitations.
Gerhard Richter, Atlas, brushstroke details
Nothing could be more painterly than the surface of a palette, with its smeared oils spread by the brush in different, arbitrary directions. The nature of mixing paints with the brush is such that the palette is devoid of image, of intended shapes or figures in the paint. It is an abstract painting on panel, the by-product of art. Yet here it has been granted a remarkable apotheosis--the colors, so vivid and yet mixing into one another, have a humble beauty of their own while still on the palette, and Richter has taken this, recognized its quality and magnified it in order to create something larger and more beautiful. The paint on the palette is completely abstract, an inadvertent action painting in miniature and yet, because Richter has photographed it and then reproduced it in oils, he has paradoxically produced something completely figurative. Ausschnitt (Kreutz) is essentially a hyperrealist still life. All of Richter's art involves some struggle against or play within the boundaries of art and painting. Nowhere is this more true than in these 'detail' paintings, where chance forms become figurative, where the tools which provide the medium for the artwork are themselves the subject matter. This is a painting of paint, about painting.
Richter painted a small series of Ausschnitt (Kreutz) paintings during the early 1970s. In some ways, these were the first photo-paintings that Richter created that truly revealed his love of the act of painting. In this work, disguised by its scale to those who do not know what it treats, Richter has raised the status of his humble painter's implements. Ausschnitt (Kreutz) therefore appears as a work of veneration, of worship, Richter already betraying the emotional attachment to his subject matter that early on he dogmatically denied but which now he openly admits has guided much of his artistic development. Richter is a painter, is obsessed with painting, and loves painting despite, and even because of, painting's limitations.
Gerhard Richter, Atlas, brushstroke details