Abstraktes Bild (438)

Painted in 1978, Abstraktes Bild is a bold and bright painting, filled with colour and movement, that dates from the early period of Richter's adventures in abstraction. There is nothing figurative, not even the hint of a landscape. Instead, the gestural brushstrokes of Action Painting are evoked in the bands of colour. Yet despite this overt abstraction, Abstraktes Bild has the same signature soft focus as so many of Richter's photorealist paintings. Indeed, this is the enlarged image of an abstract painting, and is not an abstract painting itself, as Richter explained: 'On small canvases I put random, illogical colours and forms - mostly with long pauses in between, which made sure that these paintings - if you can call them that - became more and more heterogenous. Ugly sketches is what they are' (Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt, London, 1995, p. 88). Richter has made an accurate and enlarged copy of the small abstract, meaning that Abstraktes Bild is in fact closer to the photorealist works - and especially the Ausschnitt pictures - than it is to his later Abstracts. He has paradoxically created a picture of an abstract painting, rather than an abstract painting in its own right, deftly probing the limitations of art and painting while parodying the efforts of the Abstract Expressionists. Richter himself tried to put his finger on the complex combination of ingredients and ideas in this series of Abstracts: 'Colourful, sentimental, associative, anachronistic, random, polysemic, almost like pseudo-psychograms, except that they are not legible, because they are devoid of meaning or logic - if such a thing is possible, which is a fascinating point in itself, if not the most important of all, though I still know too little about it' (Richter, ibid., pp. 88-90).