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Lot Essay
"The invention of the readymade seems to me to be the invention of reality, in other words the radical discovery that reality in contrast with the view of the world image is the only important thing. Since then painting no longer represents reality but is itself reality (produced by itself) and sometime or other it will again be a question of denying the value of this reality in order to produce pictures of a better world (as before)." (Gerhard Richter, 'Gerhard Richter', exhib. Tate Gallery 1991, p.124
Executed in 1986, 'Abstraktes Bild (643-3)' is a stunning example of a number of large abstract pictures Richter painted throughout the 1980's. One of a group of five pictures painted all at the same time, the scraped and squeezed colours and shapes of this work blend and contrast with one another to form a multi-layered and constantly shifting image that seems at each glance both real and illusory. For Richter, these abstract pictures are 'fictive models' that 'make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.' (Text for catalogue fo 'documenta 7', Kassel, 1982)
"In abstract painting" he has written, "we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualisable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy - all the resources of art in fact - in order to depict 'nothing'. Accustomed to pictures in which we recognise something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere colour (however multifarious) as the thing visualised. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualisable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible...So, in dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, extremer, more visual, and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture." (ibid.)
In this way these abstract pictures display not the image but the hope for a better world and 'Art', Richter maintains, 'is the highest form of Hope.'
Executed in 1986, 'Abstraktes Bild (643-3)' is a stunning example of a number of large abstract pictures Richter painted throughout the 1980's. One of a group of five pictures painted all at the same time, the scraped and squeezed colours and shapes of this work blend and contrast with one another to form a multi-layered and constantly shifting image that seems at each glance both real and illusory. For Richter, these abstract pictures are 'fictive models' that 'make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.' (Text for catalogue fo 'documenta 7', Kassel, 1982)
"In abstract painting" he has written, "we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualisable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy - all the resources of art in fact - in order to depict 'nothing'. Accustomed to pictures in which we recognise something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere colour (however multifarious) as the thing visualised. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualisable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible...So, in dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, extremer, more visual, and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture." (ibid.)
In this way these abstract pictures display not the image but the hope for a better world and 'Art', Richter maintains, 'is the highest form of Hope.'