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Lot Essay
Abstraktes Bild is one of several paintings executed in 1992 in which Richter made clear and regular use of vast squeegees to pull paint across the canvas in a regimented series of vertical strips. Following on from his 1990 series of abstract paintings entitled Forest--a title that Richter had belatedly bestowed upon four abstract paintings because they recalled the density, confusion and romantic atmosphere of the forest--Richter began to explore these same qualities in these vertically sequential abstracts. Seeming to both reveal and undermine a perceptual depth to the painting, the effect of these squeegeed strips with their myriad details of color and pattern is deliberately ambiguous. Seeming to both conceal and reveal at the same time and vying with one another for the eye's attention, these strips provide a pictorial demonstration of Richter's belief that what we call 'reality' is ultimately a 'fiction' a mere 'model' for understanding the world.
The deliberate ambiguity invoked in Abstraktes Bild is intended to demonstrate that all perception is an illusion. By seemingly providing two layers of conflicting abstract reality at the same time on the surface of the picture, Richter presents a forest-like mystery where the viewer quite literally can't see the wood for the trees. Only a simultaneous view of the two demonstrably alternating layers of paint provide a complete and new picture. Playing with the surfaces of his abstracts Richter is in effect exploring them in the same way that he explored the ambiguity of blurring in his photographic paintings of the 1960s. As with these works Richter is clearly still fascinated with surface and the insight it can provide into the mystery of what lies beneath.
As Richter has often pointed out, it is essentially only in the abstract that an approximate sense of the truly unfathomable nature of reality can be found. "Abstract painting", Richter has written, provides "a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy--all the resources of art in fact--in order to depict "nothing". Accustomed to pictures in which we recognize something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere color (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualizable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events, more accessible." (Gerhard Richter: Text for the catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel 1982, reprinted in Ibid. p. 100.) Richter has also said of his abstract paintings, that while essentially they remain anomalies, 'it is untrue that I have nothing specific in mind'.
His conferring the title of 'Forest' upon some of his abstract paintings illustrated that they can be seen as metaphors for the incomprehensibility of reality in much the same way that the Teutonic forest was employed in the Romantic tradition. Richter has often playfully invoked Romanticism in his work as a way of highlighting its concept of Sehnsucht--an existential longing that reflects the human need to believe--and to point out its dangers. Inherently opposed to all ideologies, which he considers, alongside 'belief of every kind' to be 'superfluous and mortally dangerous' Richter recognizes and indeed feels the longing for the superficial comfort of such beliefs. Having grown up under the ideologies of both the Third Reich and Stalinist Communism, Richter is acutely aware of the dangers of subsuming the will to such artificial rules of thinking. Romanticism lies at the root of all such ideology and, Richter believes, still pervades and conditions much of our contemporary worldview. 'I simply think that we have not yet got over the Romantic epoch', he has argued, 'The pictures of the period still constitute a part of our sensibility...if not, we would no longer look at them. Romanticism is far from dead. Exactly like fascism.'
"'Over and above this', Richter also points out however, 'if a painting is 'good', it affects us, 'in a way that exists 'beyond ideologies'. It affects us through its innate 'quality'--a phenomena which communicates itself in such a direct and immediate way that it is able to convey a wider understanding of reality without the need to be framed or bracketed by such conventions as ideologies or beliefs. It is, paradoxically perhaps, something that one can always trust or believe in, without the danger of forming an ideology or lapsing into an illusory and artificial belief. And it is in this way that art becomes what Richter has described as 'the highest form of hope' and Richter himself the 'heir to a vast, grand, rich culture of painting...which we have lost, but which still imposes obligations on us.'" (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Benjamin H.D.Buchloch reproduced in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, London, 1988, p.21.)
The deliberate ambiguity invoked in Abstraktes Bild is intended to demonstrate that all perception is an illusion. By seemingly providing two layers of conflicting abstract reality at the same time on the surface of the picture, Richter presents a forest-like mystery where the viewer quite literally can't see the wood for the trees. Only a simultaneous view of the two demonstrably alternating layers of paint provide a complete and new picture. Playing with the surfaces of his abstracts Richter is in effect exploring them in the same way that he explored the ambiguity of blurring in his photographic paintings of the 1960s. As with these works Richter is clearly still fascinated with surface and the insight it can provide into the mystery of what lies beneath.
As Richter has often pointed out, it is essentially only in the abstract that an approximate sense of the truly unfathomable nature of reality can be found. "Abstract painting", Richter has written, provides "a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy--all the resources of art in fact--in order to depict "nothing". Accustomed to pictures in which we recognize something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere color (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualizable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events, more accessible." (Gerhard Richter: Text for the catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel 1982, reprinted in Ibid. p. 100.) Richter has also said of his abstract paintings, that while essentially they remain anomalies, 'it is untrue that I have nothing specific in mind'.
His conferring the title of 'Forest' upon some of his abstract paintings illustrated that they can be seen as metaphors for the incomprehensibility of reality in much the same way that the Teutonic forest was employed in the Romantic tradition. Richter has often playfully invoked Romanticism in his work as a way of highlighting its concept of Sehnsucht--an existential longing that reflects the human need to believe--and to point out its dangers. Inherently opposed to all ideologies, which he considers, alongside 'belief of every kind' to be 'superfluous and mortally dangerous' Richter recognizes and indeed feels the longing for the superficial comfort of such beliefs. Having grown up under the ideologies of both the Third Reich and Stalinist Communism, Richter is acutely aware of the dangers of subsuming the will to such artificial rules of thinking. Romanticism lies at the root of all such ideology and, Richter believes, still pervades and conditions much of our contemporary worldview. 'I simply think that we have not yet got over the Romantic epoch', he has argued, 'The pictures of the period still constitute a part of our sensibility...if not, we would no longer look at them. Romanticism is far from dead. Exactly like fascism.'
"'Over and above this', Richter also points out however, 'if a painting is 'good', it affects us, 'in a way that exists 'beyond ideologies'. It affects us through its innate 'quality'--a phenomena which communicates itself in such a direct and immediate way that it is able to convey a wider understanding of reality without the need to be framed or bracketed by such conventions as ideologies or beliefs. It is, paradoxically perhaps, something that one can always trust or believe in, without the danger of forming an ideology or lapsing into an illusory and artificial belief. And it is in this way that art becomes what Richter has described as 'the highest form of hope' and Richter himself the 'heir to a vast, grand, rich culture of painting...which we have lost, but which still imposes obligations on us.'" (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Benjamin H.D.Buchloch reproduced in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, London, 1988, p.21.)