.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Ausschnitt (Karmin) ("Detail" Carmine) is one of the finest paintings from a rare and important series of nine works which Richter executed between 1970 and 1971. Richter's "Detail" paintings mark the culmination of the artist's photorealist painting of the 1960s, as well as strongly anticipating the development of his colourful abstract paintings of the late 1980s.
Square in format, Ausschnitt (Karmin) is a precisely rendered painting of a close-up photograph that Richter took of a thick and colourful painted brushstroke.
In his Detail paintings Richter seems to be simultaneously revelling in notions of painterliness, at the very same time that he is subverting them by reproducing in minute and exquisite detail a photographic reproduction of the fluid and very material qualities of paint. In this respect Ausschnitt (Karmin) can also clearly be seen as a development in the Pop Art tradition of subversion established by such works as Lichtenstein's cartoon Brushstroke. In reducing an expressive or gestural brushstroke to the stylised and mechanically graphic imagery of a cartoon, Lichtenstein deliberately mocked the bombastic claims of artists like the Abstract Expressionists, who gave such weight to the significance of the dynamic and expressive painterly mark. Similarly, in Ausschnitt (Karmin) Richter deliberately subverts notions of painting by placing the very material of his medium under the microscope of his own indifferent and objective eye.
(fig. 1) Photograph Sections, 1970.
Square in format, Ausschnitt (Karmin) is a precisely rendered painting of a close-up photograph that Richter took of a thick and colourful painted brushstroke.
In his Detail paintings Richter seems to be simultaneously revelling in notions of painterliness, at the very same time that he is subverting them by reproducing in minute and exquisite detail a photographic reproduction of the fluid and very material qualities of paint. In this respect Ausschnitt (Karmin) can also clearly be seen as a development in the Pop Art tradition of subversion established by such works as Lichtenstein's cartoon Brushstroke. In reducing an expressive or gestural brushstroke to the stylised and mechanically graphic imagery of a cartoon, Lichtenstein deliberately mocked the bombastic claims of artists like the Abstract Expressionists, who gave such weight to the significance of the dynamic and expressive painterly mark. Similarly, in Ausschnitt (Karmin) Richter deliberately subverts notions of painting by placing the very material of his medium under the microscope of his own indifferent and objective eye.
(fig. 1) Photograph Sections, 1970.