Abstraktes Bild

For Richter, his abstract paintings are beautiful fictions. While aesthetically they may recall the work of earlier abstract artists, philosophically and contextually, they differ. Richter has often criticized abstraction because of the "phony reverence" it inspires, declaring that his abstractions were "an assault on the falsity and the religiosity of the way people glorified abstraction." (G. Richter, interview with B.H.D. Buchloh, 1986, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 141.) Rather than revere abstraction, Richter describes the Abstract Paintings specifically as addressing the problems of painting and the difficulties confronting contemporary painters working under the great weight of the history of painting at a moment when many artists had abandoned the medium itself. According to Richter, his abstract works of the 1970s represented "my presence, my reality, my problems, my difficulties and contradictions." (Quoted in D. Dietrich, "Gerhard Richter: An Interview," The Print Collectors Newsletter, 16, no. 4, September-October 1985, p. 128.)

The Abstract Paintings are produced through a quasi-mechanical technique involving painting, overpainting and erasure. Richter begins with an image that he proceeds to erase through a process of dragging a tall plastic spatula loaded with paint across the picture's surface at a late phase in its execution. According to Richard Cork, "the blurring that resulted from the horizontal or diagonal striations seemed to have connections with his earlier habit of pulling a brush over the wet surface of his photo-based canvases. So a continuity became apparent, founded above all on his perennial need to alter the image he had already constructed." (R. Cork, "Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on Gerhard Richter," Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., London, 1991, p. 8.)