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拍品专文
Painted in 1999, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild stands as a striking example of the artist’s late-1990s investigations into the boundaries of perception, materiality, and abstraction. One of the most influential artists of the past fifty years, Gerhard Richter is known for having painted from photographs, explored grids of carefully applied colors, and produced large-scale abstractions. Abstraktes Bild belongs to Richter’s well-known abstract series where he employs an innovative technique that has allowed him to precisely control his working environment while also permitting the oil paint to mix, flow, and meld through many layers of myriad hues. Executed in oil on Alucobond, the present work embodies a complex interplay between control and chance, materiality and illusion, surface, and depth. With its restrained palette of greys, mauves, and faint reds, punctuated by sweeping vertical gestures, the present work invites prolonged contemplation, revealing itself gradually as a record of both deliberate action and unforeseen transformation. “With abstract painting,” he has intoned, “we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity, that is to say, with all the means at the disposal of art, ‘nothing’ … we allow ourselves to see the unseeable, that which has never before been seen and indeed is not visible” (G. Richter quoted in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, Minnesota 1988, p. 107). The present work was held in the private collection of Marian Goodman, the long-term legendary art dealer and gallerist for Gerhard Richter.
At first glance, Abstraktes Bild’s cool tonality appears almost monochrome with its muted tones of dark and light grey that dominate the composition, if one looks closer, they are interrupted by subtle flashes of red and soft vertical sweeps of lavender. As with much of Richter’s abstract oeuvre, the viewer is intimately aware of the artist’s process as ghostly vertical lines indicate places where the large smearing squeegee rested briefly on its journeys back and forth across the surface of the work. As the artist once described, "It is a good technique for switching off thinking consciously, I can't calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice 'between' state” (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2009, p. 251).
In 1980, Richter completed his first abstract painting that made full use of the large squeegee process that would become a signature tool of his later abstracts. Using the tool as a means to introduce chance encounters between layers of applied media, the artist pushed and pulled it across the work’s surface in an experimental effort that he devised to detach himself from the piece’s end result. He noted that these initial works in the 1980s and 90s “allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming, that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original, then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Text, London, 2009, p. 256).
While Abstraktes Bild belongs to a broader continuum of Richter’s abstract experiments, its specific palette and structure align it with the more contemplative, atmospheric works of the late 1990s. Compared with the fiery reds and vivid contrasts seen in some earlier paintings, the 1999 works often possess a quieter, almost meditative restraint. The lavender inflections that drift across the surface evoke a sense of optical vibration, an almost silicate shimmer that anticipates the artist’s later investigations into scientific imaging and crystalline forms. The coolness of the Alucobond support, with its smooth metallic rigidity, amplifies this sensation. The paint seems to hover above the panel, its subtle variations in sheen and density catching ambient light and shifting with the viewer’s perspective.
The painting’s subdued palette also reflects Richter’s long-standing fascination with the color grey, a hue he once described as “Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible or invisible. […] To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, MIT Press, 1993, p. 82-83). But in Abstraktes Bild, grey becomes far more than absence. It becomes a dynamic field in which faint reds and violets shimmer uncertainly, as if glimpsed through layers of fogged glass. This charged neutrality invites the viewer to look slowly at the surface of the work and asks the viewer to navigate shifting zones of depth and opacity. The surface becomes something like a psychological terrain, cool yet not cold, reticent yet far from mute.
At first glance, Abstraktes Bild’s cool tonality appears almost monochrome with its muted tones of dark and light grey that dominate the composition, if one looks closer, they are interrupted by subtle flashes of red and soft vertical sweeps of lavender. As with much of Richter’s abstract oeuvre, the viewer is intimately aware of the artist’s process as ghostly vertical lines indicate places where the large smearing squeegee rested briefly on its journeys back and forth across the surface of the work. As the artist once described, "It is a good technique for switching off thinking consciously, I can't calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice 'between' state” (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2009, p. 251).
In 1980, Richter completed his first abstract painting that made full use of the large squeegee process that would become a signature tool of his later abstracts. Using the tool as a means to introduce chance encounters between layers of applied media, the artist pushed and pulled it across the work’s surface in an experimental effort that he devised to detach himself from the piece’s end result. He noted that these initial works in the 1980s and 90s “allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming, that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original, then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Text, London, 2009, p. 256).
While Abstraktes Bild belongs to a broader continuum of Richter’s abstract experiments, its specific palette and structure align it with the more contemplative, atmospheric works of the late 1990s. Compared with the fiery reds and vivid contrasts seen in some earlier paintings, the 1999 works often possess a quieter, almost meditative restraint. The lavender inflections that drift across the surface evoke a sense of optical vibration, an almost silicate shimmer that anticipates the artist’s later investigations into scientific imaging and crystalline forms. The coolness of the Alucobond support, with its smooth metallic rigidity, amplifies this sensation. The paint seems to hover above the panel, its subtle variations in sheen and density catching ambient light and shifting with the viewer’s perspective.
The painting’s subdued palette also reflects Richter’s long-standing fascination with the color grey, a hue he once described as “Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible or invisible. […] To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, MIT Press, 1993, p. 82-83). But in Abstraktes Bild, grey becomes far more than absence. It becomes a dynamic field in which faint reds and violets shimmer uncertainly, as if glimpsed through layers of fogged glass. This charged neutrality invites the viewer to look slowly at the surface of the work and asks the viewer to navigate shifting zones of depth and opacity. The surface becomes something like a psychological terrain, cool yet not cold, reticent yet far from mute.