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Lot Essay
Richter's abstract paintings are made in several stages, with a softer background image overlaid with dramatic strokes and gestures. He does not work like an Abstract Expressionist, but more deliberately with the intention to disrupt and construct a new rhetoric of painting. "In their discontinous narratives lies the ground for a moral dialogue between artist and audience that invites not acquiescience, but a creative and critical response to the world it depicts. Thus 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." (R. Nasgard in "The Abstract Paintings" in Gerhard Richter Paintings, New York 1988, p. 110)
Richter responded to an interviewer's question about whether paintings produce anything beside belief in images: "....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." (in B. Buchloh "Interview with Gerhard Richter" in Gerhard Richter Paintings, New York 1988, p. 29)
Richter responded to an interviewer's question about whether paintings produce anything beside belief in images: "....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." (in B. Buchloh "Interview with Gerhard Richter" in Gerhard Richter Paintings, New York 1988, p. 29)