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拍品专文
In Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild of 1995, the celebrated German artist offers up an extraordinary richness of painterly detail across the intimate, jewel-like scale of the canvas. Luxurious layers of lavender flow across the top layer of the painting, pushed by Richter’s famed squeegee to cover the polychromatic ensemble lurking in the painting’s depths. The artist varies his sweeping motion thrice in order to create three wave-like movements across the canvas—the artist’s meticulous leftward motion is evinced in each purple form’s gradated saturation, with the deepest hues deposited right where Richter interrupts his squeegee. The vibrant greens, reds, and blues residing under the uppermost layer recall Richter’s abstract paintings of the 1980s, each glimpse into the work’s underlayers a dive into Richter’s vast oeuvre.
“Richter’s Abstract Paintings from this phase of his oeuvre,” the art historian, curator, and director of the Gerhard Richter Archive Dietmar Elger notes, are “more reserved in terms of colors, brittle, contradictory, and challenging. In addition, Richter began to concentrate more on smaller formats” (“Introduction: 1994 to 2006,” in Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 4, Ostfildern, 2015, p. 26). Richter’s Abstraktes Bild demonstrates the potency of his abstract project produced at reduced scale. So vast is the terrain of the present work that Richter and curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, selected it to be analyzed through 69 detail shots in its own monograph Gerhard Richter: Abstract Painting 825-II: 69 Details. In an afterward to the text, Obrist relays how, “at first glance the fragmented topography suggests that Richter followed a specific plan, but the search for fixed coordinates on which the choice and sequence of details might be based leads nowhere: the absence of system is the system” (“Afterward,” in Gerhard Richter: Abstract Painting 825-II: 69 Details, Wemding, 1996, n.p.).
As eloquently examined by the monograph, the present work captures the essence of Richter’s abstract system. While appearing highly organized, Richter’s abstract paintings in fact recall the characters of Franz Kafka or Italo Calvino—highly idiosyncratic yet revealing the very essence of human nature. As Richter once noted, “by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) already possesses” (quoted in A. Borchardt-Hume, “‘Dreh Dich Nicht Im’: Don’t turn around; Richter’s Paintings of the Late 1980s,” exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, p. 171). The search for an ending, a conclusion, a concrete meaning, in Richter’s abstract paintings is determinedly pointless, as Richter surrenders conscious control of his painterly process to chance. Thus, “while the multitude of painterly details continuously encourages such a search [for meaning], it also perpetually frustrates it,” as the curator Achim Borchardt-Hume describes (ibid., p. 171-72).
Richter exhumed the history of twentieth-century abstraction in his Abstraktes Bilder in order to tackle it head on. As the artist explained in an interview, his approach is “an assault on the falsity and religiosity of the way people glorified abstraction, with such phony reverence. Devotional Art—all those squares—church handicrafts” (quoted in ibid., p. 171). His pursuit of abstraction has combined elements of Constructivism and De Stijl with the non-figurative and gestural elements of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism to create a singular, contemporary style which breathes new life into abstraction for the new millennia. “To him, the Western history of abstraction appears a homogeneous mass from which to derive a ‘picture of color of inexhaustible variety,’ as Robert Storr once commented,” explains Martin Germann (M. Germann, “The Paintings of Gerhard Richter on the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025, pp. 204-7).
The present work was included in the 1996 exhibition Gerhard Richter: 100 Bilder at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes. The exhibition was a pivotal moment in Richter’s career, revealing for one of the first times the artist’s mature abstract works, which he began making in earnest following his 1988 series 17. Oktober 1976. The present work is thus a critical work for understanding the artist’s most intensive engagement with abstraction in the last decade of the twentieth century into the first decade of this century. Across the work’s reliquary-like scale, Richter’s entire painterly project may be revealed, that which “restored confidence in the importance of forms of abstractions,” providing a truly post-conceptual and contemporary perspective on abstraction as a correlation to modernity rather than as a means of transcendence (S. Wagstaff, “Introduction: The Excavation of Memory,” in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2020, p. 21).
“Richter’s Abstract Paintings from this phase of his oeuvre,” the art historian, curator, and director of the Gerhard Richter Archive Dietmar Elger notes, are “more reserved in terms of colors, brittle, contradictory, and challenging. In addition, Richter began to concentrate more on smaller formats” (“Introduction: 1994 to 2006,” in Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 4, Ostfildern, 2015, p. 26). Richter’s Abstraktes Bild demonstrates the potency of his abstract project produced at reduced scale. So vast is the terrain of the present work that Richter and curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, selected it to be analyzed through 69 detail shots in its own monograph Gerhard Richter: Abstract Painting 825-II: 69 Details. In an afterward to the text, Obrist relays how, “at first glance the fragmented topography suggests that Richter followed a specific plan, but the search for fixed coordinates on which the choice and sequence of details might be based leads nowhere: the absence of system is the system” (“Afterward,” in Gerhard Richter: Abstract Painting 825-II: 69 Details, Wemding, 1996, n.p.).
As eloquently examined by the monograph, the present work captures the essence of Richter’s abstract system. While appearing highly organized, Richter’s abstract paintings in fact recall the characters of Franz Kafka or Italo Calvino—highly idiosyncratic yet revealing the very essence of human nature. As Richter once noted, “by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) already possesses” (quoted in A. Borchardt-Hume, “‘Dreh Dich Nicht Im’: Don’t turn around; Richter’s Paintings of the Late 1980s,” exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, p. 171). The search for an ending, a conclusion, a concrete meaning, in Richter’s abstract paintings is determinedly pointless, as Richter surrenders conscious control of his painterly process to chance. Thus, “while the multitude of painterly details continuously encourages such a search [for meaning], it also perpetually frustrates it,” as the curator Achim Borchardt-Hume describes (ibid., p. 171-72).
Richter exhumed the history of twentieth-century abstraction in his Abstraktes Bilder in order to tackle it head on. As the artist explained in an interview, his approach is “an assault on the falsity and religiosity of the way people glorified abstraction, with such phony reverence. Devotional Art—all those squares—church handicrafts” (quoted in ibid., p. 171). His pursuit of abstraction has combined elements of Constructivism and De Stijl with the non-figurative and gestural elements of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism to create a singular, contemporary style which breathes new life into abstraction for the new millennia. “To him, the Western history of abstraction appears a homogeneous mass from which to derive a ‘picture of color of inexhaustible variety,’ as Robert Storr once commented,” explains Martin Germann (M. Germann, “The Paintings of Gerhard Richter on the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025, pp. 204-7).
The present work was included in the 1996 exhibition Gerhard Richter: 100 Bilder at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes. The exhibition was a pivotal moment in Richter’s career, revealing for one of the first times the artist’s mature abstract works, which he began making in earnest following his 1988 series 17. Oktober 1976. The present work is thus a critical work for understanding the artist’s most intensive engagement with abstraction in the last decade of the twentieth century into the first decade of this century. Across the work’s reliquary-like scale, Richter’s entire painterly project may be revealed, that which “restored confidence in the importance of forms of abstractions,” providing a truly post-conceptual and contemporary perspective on abstraction as a correlation to modernity rather than as a means of transcendence (S. Wagstaff, “Introduction: The Excavation of Memory,” in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2020, p. 21).