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Lot Essay
‘With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood’ (Gerhard Richter)
Formerly part of the celebrated Jan Krugier Collection, the present work is a jewel-like example of Gerhard Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder, or ‘Abstract Pictures’. Painted in 1992, it coincides with that year’s showcase of large-scale Abstrakte Bilder at documenta IX in Kassel, which propelled his abstract practice to new international acclaim. Examples from this period—some of them seen in the recent landmark retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris—are considered among the finest of Richter’s career. Using a squeegee to drag paint across the canvas, he began to stripe, lattice and intercut their layered surfaces, creating a new chromatic and textural intricacy. The present painting builds up a darkly opulent ground, with fiery oranges, blues and greens flashing through a field of black. These pigments are marbled together in broad sweeps and descending diagonal strokes. Five rhythmic, horizontal bands have been scraped through the semi-wet paint, pulling it back to reveal the toothed shimmer of the canvas beneath.
Richter had first started using the squeegee during the early 1980s. Handmade to various sizes from lengths of supple Plexiglas attached to a wooden handle, this tool allowed him to drag deposits of pigment across the surface of a canvas, merging, stuttering and obscuring the colours in unpredictable ways. He fine-tuned this approach across the following decade, reaching a nuanced mastery in the early 1990s. He painted only a handful of figurative works in these years, concentrating intensely on developing the Abstrakte Bilder. The addition of verticals and horizontals, as seen in the present work allowed him to overwrite and modulate the squeegee’s patterns in new ways. ‘Richter has taken to flaying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes’, wrote Robert Storr, ‘leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’ (R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 2002, p. 81).
Where the Abstract Expressionists had conceived of the canvas as an arena for gestural action, or a receptacle for the painter’s emotions, Richter understood his Abstrakte Bilder in more impersonal terms. He worked slowly and deliberately, wielding his squeegee in a smooth, purposeful motion. He acknowledged that his own ‘inner state’ had an impact on the works, but not in the sense of subjective content or mental imagery. Rather, he saw his disposition as just one of the myriad natural inputs that would lead to the painting’s final form, which—like the shape of a tree in a forest—was ultimately the product of chains of causation too complex to comprehend, predict or analyse. The present work exemplifies the variegated, delicate and mysterious splendour he was able to achieve. ‘At all events, this kind of painting still fascinates me today’, Richter said in 1991; ‘it feels like a force of nature’ (G. Richter in conversation with J. Storvse, 1991, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 275).
Formerly part of the celebrated Jan Krugier Collection, the present work is a jewel-like example of Gerhard Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder, or ‘Abstract Pictures’. Painted in 1992, it coincides with that year’s showcase of large-scale Abstrakte Bilder at documenta IX in Kassel, which propelled his abstract practice to new international acclaim. Examples from this period—some of them seen in the recent landmark retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris—are considered among the finest of Richter’s career. Using a squeegee to drag paint across the canvas, he began to stripe, lattice and intercut their layered surfaces, creating a new chromatic and textural intricacy. The present painting builds up a darkly opulent ground, with fiery oranges, blues and greens flashing through a field of black. These pigments are marbled together in broad sweeps and descending diagonal strokes. Five rhythmic, horizontal bands have been scraped through the semi-wet paint, pulling it back to reveal the toothed shimmer of the canvas beneath.
Richter had first started using the squeegee during the early 1980s. Handmade to various sizes from lengths of supple Plexiglas attached to a wooden handle, this tool allowed him to drag deposits of pigment across the surface of a canvas, merging, stuttering and obscuring the colours in unpredictable ways. He fine-tuned this approach across the following decade, reaching a nuanced mastery in the early 1990s. He painted only a handful of figurative works in these years, concentrating intensely on developing the Abstrakte Bilder. The addition of verticals and horizontals, as seen in the present work allowed him to overwrite and modulate the squeegee’s patterns in new ways. ‘Richter has taken to flaying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes’, wrote Robert Storr, ‘leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’ (R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 2002, p. 81).
Where the Abstract Expressionists had conceived of the canvas as an arena for gestural action, or a receptacle for the painter’s emotions, Richter understood his Abstrakte Bilder in more impersonal terms. He worked slowly and deliberately, wielding his squeegee in a smooth, purposeful motion. He acknowledged that his own ‘inner state’ had an impact on the works, but not in the sense of subjective content or mental imagery. Rather, he saw his disposition as just one of the myriad natural inputs that would lead to the painting’s final form, which—like the shape of a tree in a forest—was ultimately the product of chains of causation too complex to comprehend, predict or analyse. The present work exemplifies the variegated, delicate and mysterious splendour he was able to achieve. ‘At all events, this kind of painting still fascinates me today’, Richter said in 1991; ‘it feels like a force of nature’ (G. Richter in conversation with J. Storvse, 1991, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 275).