United by abstraction: Richter, Shiraga, Riopelle and Hodgkin

In the mid-1950s, the Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga took painting to new heights — literally. Despite being trained in the traditional practice of nihonga, he dispensed with brushes and chose to paint in a different manner. It entailed grasping a rope that hung from the ceiling, and then swinging. With his bare feet, he applied paint to a canvas that lay on the floor beneath him.

One work he created thus, Yagenko, is being offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s on 5 March 2026 — as part of a group of four abstract paintings from the same collection. The others are by Gerhard Richter, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Howard Hodgkin.

The quartet were originally from Japan, Germany, Canada and the UK respectively, yet their abstract practices transcend national borders.

‘I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion,’ Shiraga said. In the case of Yagenko, the result consists of swirls of vibrant colour bursting forth against a deep black ground. (The work’s title, in Japanese, can be translated as ‘a vision had at night’.)

The artist’s energised impasto — predominantly red, yellow and blue, punctuated by elements of pink and white — creates a depth of field.

Shiraga made his name in the Gutai group, the avant-garde movement that flourished in post-war Japan, producing works in a signature fashion that blended performance art and painting. Created in 1989, Yagenko dates from a mature period in his career. He had been initiated as a lay monk in the esoteric Tendai Buddhist sect the previous decade, and he now chanted a sutra before starting work on each painting, deeming it integral to his artistic process. One might say that the genesis of Yagenko was spiritual, while its execution was utterly dynamic.

Richter is another artist renowned for a radical painting technique: in his case, applying layers of wet paint to a canvas and then dragging a squeegee across its surface. He began using the method in the early 1980s, and it is associated with his abstract works (he has also painted figuratively).

Abstraktes Bild is an excellent example. Its surface is blazing red — red, that is, in a broad spectrum of shades, from cherry, rose and brick, to burgundy and carmine. Other colours glimmer through the surface like jewels, as if the squeegee has veiled our view of a tantalising world beyond.

Richter enjoyed the element of chance that his tool introduced. The squeegee, he said, ‘is a good technique for switching off thinking. Consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it.’

The artist painted Abstraktes Bild in 1991, on the cusp of his 60th birthday. The abstract paintings from this point in his career are widely considered his best, owing to their increased scale and complexity. Many end up having an unplanned semblance to reality — to a dazzling sunset perhaps, in the case of the work coming to auction.

Richter’s title — one he has used repeatedly — gives no hint of any real-world connection, however: the literal translation of Abstraktes Bild is ‘abstract painting’.

Contrast that with the Riopelle picture, which is called La Forêt (The Forest). Its surface is a kaleidoscope of colours: green, yellow and red, white, black and blue. Though unmistakably abstract, the painting quivers with the same deliquescent beauty as sunlight rippling through trees, or leaves fluttering in a breeze.

The artist had a lifelong love of nature, dating back to his boyhood in Canada, when he regularly went fishing and canoeing. He painted La Forêt in 1953, six years after he had quit that country to live in Paris.

According to his friend the critic Pierre Schneider, however, Riopelle’s work from this period was still deeply connected to his home continent, ‘where everything is immense… corn, snow, and above all the forest’. La Forêt is certainly large, at almost two metres wide.

Riopelle didn’t seek to represent nature in literal terms, so much as — it seems — to capture the sensations he experienced within it. ‘Nature is… a mystery,’ he said. ‘You never see it whole.’ He applied his paint to the canvas using a combination of drips and a loaded palette knife, the outcome in works such as La Forêt being a myriad of angular thickets.

Hodgkin’s In the Green Room is another abstract painting with an allusive title. The surface of this joyful work is dominated by a screen of fiery, freely applied orange brushmarks. Beneath them, a number of lighter and darker zones — including two green triangles — create a sense of receding space.

Though bearing little obvious relation to the visible world, Hodgkin’s pictures are autobiographical, evocative of moments, people and places that had meaning for him. The Englishman never actually saw himself as an abstract artist, insisting rather that he painted ‘representational pictures of emotional states’.

Whatever label one applies, his works are theatres of memory — in the case of In the Green Room, referencing the living room of a house in Cornwall owned by the writer Antony Peattie. Hodgkin painted its walls green shortly after the pair met in 1984. They would remain partners until the artist’s death more than three decades later.

‘The surface [of In the Green Room] gives an impression of freedom,’ wrote the curator Norman Rosenthal. ‘Yet Hodgkin has worked on the picture for… years, adjusting the relationship of one section to another. The effect of spontaneity is achieved by controlled and painstaking effort which results in a composition which combines logic and sensuality in a unique way.’

Hodgkin painted the work between 1984 and 1986 — and at that point in his career, it counted among the largest he had ever made (it spans almost two metres across). This period, incidentally, was one of growing acclaim for the artist, during which he both won the Turner Prize and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Hodgkin was a deeply private individual, but his paintings hint at a life full of emotional richness.

Hodgkin, Shiraga, Richter and Riopelle came from different lands and adopted very different painting techniques. What they had in common, though, was the production of stunning abstract works, which are chromatically complex and visually dynamic, and which drift in and out of resemblance to the world we know.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, until 19 March 2026. Explore the preview exhibition and sales