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Lot Essay
‘Grey is for me a welcome and unique possibility of achieving indifference, of avoiding definite statements’ (Gerhard Richter)
An inscrutable, opaque plane of its eponymous colour, Grau (Grey) (1974) belongs to a pivotal series in Gerhard Richter’s career. The Graue Bilder or ‘Grey Paintings’, a sequence of entirely grey abstract paintings made between 1968 and 1976, demonstrate an artist seeking a new mode of expression. Executed in a dark grey oil paint applied to the canvas as a seamless colour field, the present work was created for a major 1974 exhibition of the Graue Bilder at the Städtisches Museum in Mönchengladbach, which later travelled to the Kunstverein Braunschweig. Celebrated at the time as a ‘manifesto in Grey’, the exhibition was accompanied by a limited edition boxed artist’s book.
Richter commenced work on the Graue Bilder after achieving success with his photo-paintings. The colour grey was already a feature of his practice. His photorealistic works of the 1960s often featured a grisaille palette inherent to their origins in newsprint imagery or black-and-white photographs. Towards the end of that decade Richter began a gradual turn to abstraction—partly inspired by contemporaries such as the American Minimalist Robert Ryman and his friend Blinky Palermo—in which the Graue Bilder played an important role, culminating in his vibrant canvases of the 1980s. His first grey paintings emerged as an attempt to salvage unsuccessful works by covering them over: a process melding destruction and rebirth. This prompted him to explore the potential of all-grey work. Richter would mix black and white paint with brown and blue pigments to create a spectrum of grey hues, which he would then apply to a canvas with a brush, putty knife or roller. The result is an unparalleled exploration into the variety of expression and nuance that can be achieved with variations upon a single colour.
Grey, wrote Richter in 1975, ‘is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make “nothing” visible ...’ (G. Richter, ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, in H. U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83). The series also extends Richter’s career-long investigation of painting’s ability to capture truth. As Dietmar Elger writes, ‘In concentrating on the colour Grey, Richter explores the multifaceted, complex personalities offered by painting. Because the monochromatic Grey excludes any kind of approach or association, these paintings touch the very boundaries of artistic creativity’ (D. Elger, ‘Introduction’, in D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2: 1968-1976, Dresden 2017, p. 28). The present painting is a profound expression of Richter’s ever-questioning practice.
An inscrutable, opaque plane of its eponymous colour, Grau (Grey) (1974) belongs to a pivotal series in Gerhard Richter’s career. The Graue Bilder or ‘Grey Paintings’, a sequence of entirely grey abstract paintings made between 1968 and 1976, demonstrate an artist seeking a new mode of expression. Executed in a dark grey oil paint applied to the canvas as a seamless colour field, the present work was created for a major 1974 exhibition of the Graue Bilder at the Städtisches Museum in Mönchengladbach, which later travelled to the Kunstverein Braunschweig. Celebrated at the time as a ‘manifesto in Grey’, the exhibition was accompanied by a limited edition boxed artist’s book.
Richter commenced work on the Graue Bilder after achieving success with his photo-paintings. The colour grey was already a feature of his practice. His photorealistic works of the 1960s often featured a grisaille palette inherent to their origins in newsprint imagery or black-and-white photographs. Towards the end of that decade Richter began a gradual turn to abstraction—partly inspired by contemporaries such as the American Minimalist Robert Ryman and his friend Blinky Palermo—in which the Graue Bilder played an important role, culminating in his vibrant canvases of the 1980s. His first grey paintings emerged as an attempt to salvage unsuccessful works by covering them over: a process melding destruction and rebirth. This prompted him to explore the potential of all-grey work. Richter would mix black and white paint with brown and blue pigments to create a spectrum of grey hues, which he would then apply to a canvas with a brush, putty knife or roller. The result is an unparalleled exploration into the variety of expression and nuance that can be achieved with variations upon a single colour.
Grey, wrote Richter in 1975, ‘is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make “nothing” visible ...’ (G. Richter, ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, in H. U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83). The series also extends Richter’s career-long investigation of painting’s ability to capture truth. As Dietmar Elger writes, ‘In concentrating on the colour Grey, Richter explores the multifaceted, complex personalities offered by painting. Because the monochromatic Grey excludes any kind of approach or association, these paintings touch the very boundaries of artistic creativity’ (D. Elger, ‘Introduction’, in D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2: 1968-1976, Dresden 2017, p. 28). The present painting is a profound expression of Richter’s ever-questioning practice.