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Lot Essay
An excerpt from an interview with Gerhard Richter by Jonas Storsve, 1991
Jonas Storsve: How did you come to do the Abstract Pictures? I mean the pictures painted without photographic originals.
Gerhard Richter: I've been doing the Abstract Pictures, properly so called, only since 1976, when I quite deliberately accepted the random willful element and painted those fairly colourful, heterogeneous pictures. Perhaps I was harking back to my youthful beginnings. At all events, this kind of painting still fascinates me today; it feels like a force of nature.
JS: Are these paintings still random and willful?
GR: Not directly any more. I'm more concerned now to have them evolve of their own accord. I don't work at random but in a more planned way, in a sense that I let a thing happen by chance then correct it, and so on. The actual work consists in taking what appears, looking at it and then deciding whether it's acceptable or not. Perhaps this way of working has something in common with the Readymade: the artist lets someone else - it doesn't matter who - do the work of making the objects, and the real work lies in observing the thing and deciding whether it's any good"
(G. Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, London, 1993, pp. 229-230)
Jonas Storsve: How did you come to do the Abstract Pictures? I mean the pictures painted without photographic originals.
Gerhard Richter: I've been doing the Abstract Pictures, properly so called, only since 1976, when I quite deliberately accepted the random willful element and painted those fairly colourful, heterogeneous pictures. Perhaps I was harking back to my youthful beginnings. At all events, this kind of painting still fascinates me today; it feels like a force of nature.
JS: Are these paintings still random and willful?
GR: Not directly any more. I'm more concerned now to have them evolve of their own accord. I don't work at random but in a more planned way, in a sense that I let a thing happen by chance then correct it, and so on. The actual work consists in taking what appears, looking at it and then deciding whether it's acceptable or not. Perhaps this way of working has something in common with the Readymade: the artist lets someone else - it doesn't matter who - do the work of making the objects, and the real work lies in observing the thing and deciding whether it's any good"
(G. Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, London, 1993, pp. 229-230)