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

Abstraktes Bild

Details
GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild
signed, inscribed and dated '680-2 Richter 1988' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
78 ¾ x 70 7/8 in. (200 x 180 cm.)
Painted in 1988.
Provenance
Deweer Collection, Otegem, Belgium, acquired directly from the artist, 1990
Anon. sale; Sotheby’s, London, 10 February 2010, lot 55
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Literature
Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné: 1962–1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, n.p., no. 680-2 (illustrated).
D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 4, 1988-1994, Ostfildern, 2015, pp. 186-187, no. 680-2 (illustrated).
Exhibited
Otegem, Deweer Art Gallery, A Painting Show, October-December 1994, p. 24 (illustrated).
Further Details
“With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity, that is to say, with all the means at the disposal of art, ‘nothing’ … we allow ourselves to see the unseeable, that which has never before been seen and indeed is not visible.” Gerhard Richter

Forging a singular path through the artistic developments of post-war and contemporary art, Gerhard Richter expanded the idea of what painting could be when he chose it as his primary medium in 1962. Studying in post-World War II Germany, an introduction to American abstraction and British Pop had a profound effect on the artist as he sought to push beyond traditional modes and establish a more investigative practice that questioned medium, process, subject, and objecthood. Abstraktes Bild is a dazzling example of what has become his iconic practice of surface handling and represents Richter’s ability to explore issues of chance and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism within an entirely new framework. Hailing from the innovative series of the same name begun in the 1980s, the present work represents an absolutely new type of non-representational canvas that was born out of the artist’s early experiments with abstract landscapes and color studies. Equating abstraction not to any emotional outburst or action, he remarked, “With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity, that is to say, with all the means at the disposal of art, ‘nothing’ … we allow ourselves to see the unseeable, that which has never before been seen and indeed is not visible” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, Minnesota, 1988, p. 107). Relinquishing the control that brushes afford, his highly manipulative approach to these dynamic canvases established an intimate dialogue between the artist and the materials themselves.

Rendered in smokey silver tones with an underlying layer of riotous color, Abstraktes Bild is like a geode waiting to be cracked open. The strong downward pull of Richter’s squeegee drags the paint in lines against itself and the stretched canvas beneath, thereby creating an intense verticality that sets the entire composition in motion. Working with a multitude of painterly applications, the artist applies pigment after pigment to the work so that he can establish a thick, complex strata that is representative of his time spent. This accumulation of layers makes itself known as Richter excavates and obscures with his tools. Areas of pewter begin to appear as the dark blue, black, and gray overpainting comes away. Exploring further, orange, red, and yellow patches shine through like the glowing embers hidden in a charred tree. While the choice of tones and the layering order is firmly Richter’s decision, the ways in which they interact throughout the process and in the final work are not. By using the squeegee, a device that allows for little more than directional control by the artist, Richter leaves the results up to chance as areas combine, pull away, stretch, and peel. “If the execution works,” he once explained, “this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything…I often find this intolerable and even impossible to accept, because, as a thinking, planning human being, it humiliates me to find out that I am so powerless…My only consolation is to tell myself that I did actually make the pictures – even though they treat me any way they like and somehow just take shape. Because it’s still up to me to determine the point at which they are finished (picture-making consists of a multitude of Yes/No decisions with a Yes to end it all)” (G. Richter, quoted in A. Borchardt-Hume, “‘Dreh Dich Nicht Um’: Don’t Turn Around: Richter’s Paintings of the Late 1980s” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2011, p. 172). Allowing the tools and materials to essentially dictate his process, Richter removes much of the artist’s hand in favor of a tenuous authorial control over turbulent encounters.

Throughout his career, Richter has remained devoted to a full-fledged exploration of painting as an art form but has consciously deviated from any linear evolution of style or subject within each of his discrete series. Beginning with works anchored in photographic sources and then expanding to myriad abstractions, charts, and other color-focused inquiries, his end results are visually diverse but continue to revolve around the artist’s analysis of painting in all its forms. This varied output is obvious in comparing the present example with works like 18. Oktober 1977 (1988), finished in the same year. Unlike the fully abstract squeegee painting, the latter returns to the artist’s enlarged and purposefully blurred paintings of photographs for which he became known in the early 1960s. There is a discernibly representative subject rendered in exacting detail, and connections to the politically charged source material are easily drawn even with the artist’s hazy brushwork. Abstraktes Bild, on the other hand, is fully non-representational and serves as a potent treatise on the nature of paint and Richter’s embrace of chance occurrences on a monumental scale. Taking this all into consideration while also alluding to his other compositional frameworks, it is clear that the artist has been working on a systematic investigation of painting as a medium rather than chasing any sort of signature stylistic progression. His ability to work on two canvases in the same year that seem so diametrically opposed just serves to further illustrate his devotion to a conceptual mode of inquiry that weaves its thread through multiple representations.

Growing up in East Germany, Richter began studying painting in 1951 at the Kunstakademie in Dresden. However, because of the separation of Germany at that time, he was not able to fully explore new modes of making art. A visit to Documenta II in 1959 shook up his worldview. He recalled that pivotal moment when he noted, “At the exhibition, I was looking for realistic paintings, and hardly found anything I liked, and then I saw Pollock and Fontana – and I was shocked. They were so brazen. One had just made a cut in the canvas, the other had dripped paint on it. I was completely unprepared for that…It had an influence, in the sense that it was one more reason to leave the GDR” (G. Richter, quoted in “I Have Nothing to Say and I’m Saying It: Conversation Between Gerhard Richter and Nicholas Serota, Spring 2011” in Ibid., p. 20).

His introduction to these radical ideas precipitated his leaving for West Germany in 1961 where he resumed his studies in Düsseldorf. There, though he frequently worked with elements of conceptual art and performance with his classmates Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, he still touted himself as a painter first and foremost. When he began to use photographs in his work, he separated himself from the early Photorealists by using the image as a starting point for an intense study of painting and the work as an object itself instead of faithfully recreating the precision of the camera. These early works, like Cow (1964) and Stag (1963) firmly established Richter as an artist who used photographs to create paintings rather than a painter of images. As his career evolved, he turned to other sources for exploratory inspiration until, as in the current example, he landed on the very building blocks of painting itself. Painting is always the central motif in Richter’s oeuvre, and the variety of forms it takes is a testament to his intense scrutiny of tradition, process, and material.

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