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Lot Essay
Filled with an amazing self-awareness, Richter's abstract paintings are visual feasts. In Untitled, painted in 1982, the vibrant, even lurid colours attract the eye, while the movement of the paint keeps it moving across the canvas. There is a sensual mechanics involved in viewing Richter's abstracts: the eye is drawn across the canvas by the paint, dragged in the tracks of Richter's own brush and hand. This accentuates the seeming self-awareness of Untitled, which is a painting very much about painting. At the same time, it is an engaging visual feast.
With the combination of its materiality, the movement and the electric intensity of the colours, Richter absorbs the viewer in the painting, permitting him to exert a showman-like manipulation of his viewer. In this way, he demonstrates how much he 'just wanted to reemphasize my claim that we are not able to see in any other way. We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket, and so on. When we don't find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested until we have to turn away because we are bored. That's how abstract painting works' (Richter (2001), quoted in Robert Storr, 'Interview with Gerhard Richter', pp. 287-309, exh. cat, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, ed. Robert Storr, New York 2002, p. 304).
With the combination of its materiality, the movement and the electric intensity of the colours, Richter absorbs the viewer in the painting, permitting him to exert a showman-like manipulation of his viewer. In this way, he demonstrates how much he 'just wanted to reemphasize my claim that we are not able to see in any other way. We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket, and so on. When we don't find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested until we have to turn away because we are bored. That's how abstract painting works' (Richter (2001), quoted in Robert Storr, 'Interview with Gerhard Richter', pp. 287-309, exh. cat, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, ed. Robert Storr, New York 2002, p. 304).