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Lot Essay
In 1962, at the age of thirty, Gerhard Richter adopted a definitive postmodern posture to his work that rejected all ideology - political, spiritual and aesthetic - in order to embrace the multiplicity, simultaneity and flux of reality. Since then, his creations have taken on various formal guises but have retained his signature brand of aesthetic indifference. Borrowing a nihilistic epithet from John Cage, Richter stated, "I had nothing to say and was saying it".
Resonating perfectly with this idea, the artist's abstract paintings offered vessels of the ineffable. The artist states, "Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, the incomprehensible (cited in Jutta Nestegard, Gerhard Richter: the Art of the Impossible - Paintings 1964-1998, exh. cat., Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, 1999, pp. 53-54). The artist's richly polychromatic, heavily impastoed, spatially complex abstractions are tentative, ambiguous and questioning; painted from a position uncertainty, they present broken narratives through their unexpected juxtapositions of color, texture and space. Richter states, "the heterogeneity of the work is also its truthfulness... The character of the Abstract Paintings is not their resolution but the dispersal of their elements, their coexisting contradictory expressions and moods, their opposition of promises and denials." (cited in ibid., p. 110). Tisch is entirely human in its equivocal stance, but is nonetheless visually magnificent, a veritable coup of the senses.
Richter uses brushes, spatulas and squeegees in a myriad of movements to direct vibrant color across tracks that alternately recede into illusionistic space and emerge into tactile sensuality. Invoking the infinite depth of midnight, a hushed calm of deep blue collides with the surface flurry of orange, yellow and red. The juxtaposition is electric; the contrasts sharp. One is even reminded of the opposing color-field and gestural branches of the New York school when confronting the left and right side of the canvas, the former invoking a transcendent state and the latter visceral in its claim of corporeal exertions.
And yet, abstract paintings such as Tisch are not made in the name of Abstract Expressionism or Informel. Spontaneity in the physical act gives way to prolonged interrogation. Richter begins each new group of abstract paintings by placing a number of primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several or all of them at the same time. He begins by applying a soft ground of red, yellow, blue or green. He states, "This is comparatively simple and for half a day looks quite beautiful and full of feeling." But then it is altered, with a new move, a first form; a large brush stroke, a track of color drawn out with a squeegee, a geometric shape. Step by step the painting changes in appearance, sometimes sharply, with each new accretion, and goes through several states. These are quite attractive in themselves but are usually sacrificed because they are "too slight, too stupid, or too sentimental, because in any case they are not what I wanted." They are finished "when there is no more I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with". (R. Nasgaard, "The Abstract Paintings" in ed. T. Neff Gerhard Richter-- Paintings, London 1988, p.108).
Tisch refuses to indulge longings for recognition and order, but instead, inverts, transforms and decomposes from one point of view to the next. Richter states, "We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket, and so on. When we don't find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested until we have to turn away because we are bored" (cited in R. Storr, 'Interview with Gerhard Richter', pp. 287-309, exh. cat, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, ed. R. Storr, New York 2002, p. 304). Rather than lulling the viewer into a state of "getting it", Tisch rewards every viewing afresh through its layered complexity. It has an elastic quality that seems to stretch visually and intellectually at its every intake.
The painting's fluid passage from one optical paradigm to another reminds one of the simultaneity of existence and its overall lack of cohesion within a grand scheme. Rather than regarding his abstract paintings solely as images, Richter states, "....I can also regard my abstractions as parables, as images of a possible form of social relations. Seen in this way, what I'm attempting in each picture is nothing other than this: to bring together, in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom. Not paradise." (cited in B. Buchloh "Interview with Gerhard Richter" in Gerhard Richter Paintings, New York 1988, p. 29). Not paradise, perhaps, but certainly not hell. Growing up with the legacy of the Third Reich, Richter has always been attuned to the imposed dogma and dangers of ideologies and has consistently moved away from such limitations in his art. Swimming beautifully in its state of multiplicity, Tisch aspires towards a freedom that is not Utopian but real and within palpable reach.
Resonating perfectly with this idea, the artist's abstract paintings offered vessels of the ineffable. The artist states, "Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, the incomprehensible (cited in Jutta Nestegard, Gerhard Richter: the Art of the Impossible - Paintings 1964-1998, exh. cat., Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, 1999, pp. 53-54). The artist's richly polychromatic, heavily impastoed, spatially complex abstractions are tentative, ambiguous and questioning; painted from a position uncertainty, they present broken narratives through their unexpected juxtapositions of color, texture and space. Richter states, "the heterogeneity of the work is also its truthfulness... The character of the Abstract Paintings is not their resolution but the dispersal of their elements, their coexisting contradictory expressions and moods, their opposition of promises and denials." (cited in ibid., p. 110). Tisch is entirely human in its equivocal stance, but is nonetheless visually magnificent, a veritable coup of the senses.
Richter uses brushes, spatulas and squeegees in a myriad of movements to direct vibrant color across tracks that alternately recede into illusionistic space and emerge into tactile sensuality. Invoking the infinite depth of midnight, a hushed calm of deep blue collides with the surface flurry of orange, yellow and red. The juxtaposition is electric; the contrasts sharp. One is even reminded of the opposing color-field and gestural branches of the New York school when confronting the left and right side of the canvas, the former invoking a transcendent state and the latter visceral in its claim of corporeal exertions.
And yet, abstract paintings such as Tisch are not made in the name of Abstract Expressionism or Informel. Spontaneity in the physical act gives way to prolonged interrogation. Richter begins each new group of abstract paintings by placing a number of primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several or all of them at the same time. He begins by applying a soft ground of red, yellow, blue or green. He states, "This is comparatively simple and for half a day looks quite beautiful and full of feeling." But then it is altered, with a new move, a first form; a large brush stroke, a track of color drawn out with a squeegee, a geometric shape. Step by step the painting changes in appearance, sometimes sharply, with each new accretion, and goes through several states. These are quite attractive in themselves but are usually sacrificed because they are "too slight, too stupid, or too sentimental, because in any case they are not what I wanted." They are finished "when there is no more I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with". (R. Nasgaard, "The Abstract Paintings" in ed. T. Neff Gerhard Richter-- Paintings, London 1988, p.108).
Tisch refuses to indulge longings for recognition and order, but instead, inverts, transforms and decomposes from one point of view to the next. Richter states, "We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket, and so on. When we don't find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested until we have to turn away because we are bored" (cited in R. Storr, 'Interview with Gerhard Richter', pp. 287-309, exh. cat, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, ed. R. Storr, New York 2002, p. 304). Rather than lulling the viewer into a state of "getting it", Tisch rewards every viewing afresh through its layered complexity. It has an elastic quality that seems to stretch visually and intellectually at its every intake.
The painting's fluid passage from one optical paradigm to another reminds one of the simultaneity of existence and its overall lack of cohesion within a grand scheme. Rather than regarding his abstract paintings solely as images, Richter states, "....I can also regard my abstractions as parables, as images of a possible form of social relations. Seen in this way, what I'm attempting in each picture is nothing other than this: to bring together, in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom. Not paradise." (cited in B. Buchloh "Interview with Gerhard Richter" in Gerhard Richter Paintings, New York 1988, p. 29). Not paradise, perhaps, but certainly not hell. Growing up with the legacy of the Third Reich, Richter has always been attuned to the imposed dogma and dangers of ideologies and has consistently moved away from such limitations in his art. Swimming beautifully in its state of multiplicity, Tisch aspires towards a freedom that is not Utopian but real and within palpable reach.