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Lot Essay
Laden with desire and despair in equal measure, Umgeschlagenes Blatt (Turned Sheet) stands among Gerhard Richter’s most complex commentaries on the fictive nature of representation. Painted in 1966, it occupies pivotal territory in the artist’s journey from his early photo-paintings to his later abstractions. With its meticulous trompe l’oeil image of furling paper, the work belongs to a series of canvases Richter created between 1965 and 1966 – one of which resides in the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany – depicting a series of turning and torn pages. Executed the year after Richter saw Marcel Duchamp’s major touring retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, the work marks a new phase in his engagement with the legacy of the ‘readymade’. Where the artist had previously relied upon photographic source material, the mid-1960s saw him begin to relinquish his grasp on pre-existing supports. A new group of works – known collectively as the Constructions – strove to achieve the same degree of photo-illusionism without the use of direct prototypes. As well as turned pages, Richter painted doors, windows, curtains and iron rods, rendering their invented forms with disarming verisimilitude. Built with the technical precision of realist painting, yet pushed to the brink of abstraction by its subject matter, the present work invites rapt scrutiny from the viewer, only to reveal itself as a constructed illusion. As the page turns to reveal only further blankness, the work lifts the veil on art’s true nature: namely, that its claim to reality is fundamentally void.
By 1965, Richter was beginning to make waves in the art world. That year, the critic Rolf-Gunter Dienst published one of the earliest discussions of his work in a volume entitled Pop Art: A Critical Report. ‘He is no longer concerned solely with copying the image’, he wrote. ‘Through his manner of representation, Richter wants to awaken deep-seated emotions and associations in the viewer, who may not have been aware of them before’ (R. G. Dienst, Pop Art: A Critical Report, Wiesbaden 1965, p. 70). Despite their apparently innocuous subjects, the Constructions offered a deeply poignant message: that, in the wake of the Second World War, art could no longer lay claim to truth. By removing the support of pre-existing imagery, Richter took one step further towards the free abstractions he would fully embrace in the 1980s: works created without props, plans or scaffolding. In these paintings, as in the present, the tantalising promise of what might lie beyond the screen is held in tension with an inability to penetrate its depths. The work and its construction are one and the same. In Umgeschlagenes Blatt, Richter spells in figurative terms the notion that would guide the rest of his practice: that however much we might attempt to peel back its layers of illusion, the image was no longer a gateway to the outside world. Its only claim to reality began and ended with the picture plane itself.
By 1965, Richter was beginning to make waves in the art world. That year, the critic Rolf-Gunter Dienst published one of the earliest discussions of his work in a volume entitled Pop Art: A Critical Report. ‘He is no longer concerned solely with copying the image’, he wrote. ‘Through his manner of representation, Richter wants to awaken deep-seated emotions and associations in the viewer, who may not have been aware of them before’ (R. G. Dienst, Pop Art: A Critical Report, Wiesbaden 1965, p. 70). Despite their apparently innocuous subjects, the Constructions offered a deeply poignant message: that, in the wake of the Second World War, art could no longer lay claim to truth. By removing the support of pre-existing imagery, Richter took one step further towards the free abstractions he would fully embrace in the 1980s: works created without props, plans or scaffolding. In these paintings, as in the present, the tantalising promise of what might lie beyond the screen is held in tension with an inability to penetrate its depths. The work and its construction are one and the same. In Umgeschlagenes Blatt, Richter spells in figurative terms the notion that would guide the rest of his practice: that however much we might attempt to peel back its layers of illusion, the image was no longer a gateway to the outside world. Its only claim to reality began and ended with the picture plane itself.