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拍品专文
Gem-like speckles of glimmering ultramarine and crimson paint shimmer out from beneath blurred layers of blue, yellow, and green in Gerhard Richter’s Mohn. Painted in 1995, a seminal year in the German artist’s oeuvre, the present work exemplifies the polychromatic and technical complexity that define Richter’s mature abstractions, which the artist himself has described as “more adult.” Mohn, meaning poppy, is notable for its vibrant red notes. While Richter employed bright reds among his abstract paintings of the early 1980s, he later adopted a more somber, monochromatic gray palette. His important 18. Oktober 1977 series of 1988 marked a creative caesura in Richter’s oeuvre. “I realize that these pictures set a new standard, set a challenge for me,” Richter described. “I may be deceiving myself. It’s all still too fresh. But one thing I have realized; it’s hard for me to go on painting” (quoted in D. Elger, “Introduction: 1988 to 1994,” in Gerard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 4, Ostfildern, 2015, p. 20).
Following the 18. Oktober 1977 series, documenting the deaths of three militant activists in Germany, Richter entered a creative crisis. The artist wrote in a journal entry in August 1990: “Since Rotterdam exhibition [October 1989], painting has become more laborious. At the end of December, I cancelled the exhibitions planned for this year… so as to have a whole year to ‘evolve’ something without commitments” (quoted in ibid., p. 22). The following years witness an exceptional period of development; Richter adopts the use of the spatula as counterpart to his squeegee in 1991. “Scraping off. For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my paintings but scrape off, pile on, and then remove again,” Richter laments in a September 1992 diary entry (quoted in ibid). Following several more years of determined struggle with painting, Richter reaches a breakthrough in 1995, with his development culminating in Mohn.
The present work witnesses Richter utilizing his new scraping tool with methodical precision. The artist meticulously balances the horizontal thrust of his squeegee with the vertical pull of his spatula, establishing a complex compositional balance as he wields his two tools. Richter attacked the left side of the canvas with verve, exposing myriad underlayers of vibrant pigment while simultaneously creating a thrilling impastoed effect. The rigor evoked on the left side contrasts with the tranquility on the right, where Richter’s excavating spatula gives way to the mesmeric blurring effect of his squeegee. Here, Richter’s electric top layers of pigment meld together into a trance-like oblivion.
In an interview contemporaneous to the present work, Richter explains his shift away from his monochromatic figurative painting as well as his more austere abstract works from the early 1990s. “That would be old-fashioned. Painting is color. My use of black and white earlier was part of my general act of refusal” (quoted in “Interview with Susanne Ehrenfried, 1995,” in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds. Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, New York, 2009, p. 319). Richter’s major traveling retrospective the prior year, originating at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in September before travelling to Bonn, Stockholm, and then Madrid, established without doubt Richter as one of the most significant painters alive. On a biographical level, Richter’s son Moritz was born January 6, 1995, which the artist celebrated with a series of blurred color portraits of his new wife Sabine holding their newborn. While recalling Richter’s earlier 1965 painting Tante Marianne, a painted grayscale portrait after a photograph showing the young artist in the arms of his aunt, Richter’s S. mit Kind paintings are in color, revealing the artist’s newfound chromatic vibrancy, which revives in his Tulips paintings of the same year.
Mohn continues the floral motif which Richter explores in his Tulips. Poppies hold symbolic significance in both poetic and historical contexts—the flower is used to commemorate World War I in Commonwealth countries, while in Germanic poetry the flower’s ephemerality and excess of color is celebrated in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Mohn poems and used as a potent symbol of Holocaust remembrance in Paul Celan’s collection Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), first published in 1952. In poems like Schlaf-Mohn, Rilke emphasizes the poppy’s intoxicating effects, leading to exhaustion. Mohn elaborates on this sense of intoxication—the artist here builds layers upon layers of paint onto his canvas, which he then blurs and scrapes to create a tableau of cacophonic exuberance. Richter’s intent is similar to intoxication, presenting to his viewer a novel experience which poisons one’s perception of reality: “I don’t mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing,” the artist has remarked. “I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed” (quoted in D. Brill, “That’s as Far as it Goes,” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, a Retrospective, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2011, p. 247).
Celan’s poetic project parallels Richter’s own longstanding meditation on the collective guilt and national memories surrounding World War II. His early photograph-derived paintings Uncle Rudi (1965) and Aunt Marianne (1965) reflect upon his uncle’s association with the Nazi regime and his aunt’s murder in a concentration camp, while his late Birkenau series (2014) reckons with issues of identity and collective memory in post-World War II Germany, confronting whether and how art is able to address the Holocaust. Mohn thus derives great significance in its connection to many of Richter’s most important works, dwelling in a more abstract manner on themes which the German artist has spent decades meditating on. These works in total represent what André Rottmann describes as “Richter’s challenging practice of creating distanced, probably even withdrawn, yet intimate and poignant images of history that, as the art historian Stefan Germer has noted, problematize the very representability of the historical without abandoning the task of facing the past altogether” (“Facing History: Richter’s Somber Reflection,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025, p. 160).
Remembrance and historical memory would have been front of mind for Richter as he was working on the present work. A media furor erupted in 1995 over the planned removal of the artist’s 17. Oktober 1976 series from their long-term display at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main after the series was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Likewise, Richter pondered the series anew following the birth of his son in 1995. The artist viewed the S. mit Kind paintings as a private counterpart to the cycle: “the Baader-Meinhof cycle [17. Oktober 1976] consists of distant, hopeless pictures of death in the face of a utopia that has deteriorated into violence. In view of this tarnished utopia, S. mit Kind are paintings that arose out of private happiness, but also speak of the untruthfulness of everyday images and their necessary destruction, and of decay and death” (quoted in D. Elger, op. cit., p. 16). Mohn demonstrates Richter’s careful balancing of his private happiness and continual dwelling on decay and destruction within his celebrated abstract mode, the work poignantly revealing why Richter’s practice is considered to have “advanced to define painting in the present” (A. Rottmann, “Randomizing Painting: Notes on Richter’s Abstractions,” in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2020, p. 93).
Following the 18. Oktober 1977 series, documenting the deaths of three militant activists in Germany, Richter entered a creative crisis. The artist wrote in a journal entry in August 1990: “Since Rotterdam exhibition [October 1989], painting has become more laborious. At the end of December, I cancelled the exhibitions planned for this year… so as to have a whole year to ‘evolve’ something without commitments” (quoted in ibid., p. 22). The following years witness an exceptional period of development; Richter adopts the use of the spatula as counterpart to his squeegee in 1991. “Scraping off. For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my paintings but scrape off, pile on, and then remove again,” Richter laments in a September 1992 diary entry (quoted in ibid). Following several more years of determined struggle with painting, Richter reaches a breakthrough in 1995, with his development culminating in Mohn.
The present work witnesses Richter utilizing his new scraping tool with methodical precision. The artist meticulously balances the horizontal thrust of his squeegee with the vertical pull of his spatula, establishing a complex compositional balance as he wields his two tools. Richter attacked the left side of the canvas with verve, exposing myriad underlayers of vibrant pigment while simultaneously creating a thrilling impastoed effect. The rigor evoked on the left side contrasts with the tranquility on the right, where Richter’s excavating spatula gives way to the mesmeric blurring effect of his squeegee. Here, Richter’s electric top layers of pigment meld together into a trance-like oblivion.
In an interview contemporaneous to the present work, Richter explains his shift away from his monochromatic figurative painting as well as his more austere abstract works from the early 1990s. “That would be old-fashioned. Painting is color. My use of black and white earlier was part of my general act of refusal” (quoted in “Interview with Susanne Ehrenfried, 1995,” in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds. Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, New York, 2009, p. 319). Richter’s major traveling retrospective the prior year, originating at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in September before travelling to Bonn, Stockholm, and then Madrid, established without doubt Richter as one of the most significant painters alive. On a biographical level, Richter’s son Moritz was born January 6, 1995, which the artist celebrated with a series of blurred color portraits of his new wife Sabine holding their newborn. While recalling Richter’s earlier 1965 painting Tante Marianne, a painted grayscale portrait after a photograph showing the young artist in the arms of his aunt, Richter’s S. mit Kind paintings are in color, revealing the artist’s newfound chromatic vibrancy, which revives in his Tulips paintings of the same year.
Mohn continues the floral motif which Richter explores in his Tulips. Poppies hold symbolic significance in both poetic and historical contexts—the flower is used to commemorate World War I in Commonwealth countries, while in Germanic poetry the flower’s ephemerality and excess of color is celebrated in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Mohn poems and used as a potent symbol of Holocaust remembrance in Paul Celan’s collection Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), first published in 1952. In poems like Schlaf-Mohn, Rilke emphasizes the poppy’s intoxicating effects, leading to exhaustion. Mohn elaborates on this sense of intoxication—the artist here builds layers upon layers of paint onto his canvas, which he then blurs and scrapes to create a tableau of cacophonic exuberance. Richter’s intent is similar to intoxication, presenting to his viewer a novel experience which poisons one’s perception of reality: “I don’t mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing,” the artist has remarked. “I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed” (quoted in D. Brill, “That’s as Far as it Goes,” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, a Retrospective, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2011, p. 247).
Celan’s poetic project parallels Richter’s own longstanding meditation on the collective guilt and national memories surrounding World War II. His early photograph-derived paintings Uncle Rudi (1965) and Aunt Marianne (1965) reflect upon his uncle’s association with the Nazi regime and his aunt’s murder in a concentration camp, while his late Birkenau series (2014) reckons with issues of identity and collective memory in post-World War II Germany, confronting whether and how art is able to address the Holocaust. Mohn thus derives great significance in its connection to many of Richter’s most important works, dwelling in a more abstract manner on themes which the German artist has spent decades meditating on. These works in total represent what André Rottmann describes as “Richter’s challenging practice of creating distanced, probably even withdrawn, yet intimate and poignant images of history that, as the art historian Stefan Germer has noted, problematize the very representability of the historical without abandoning the task of facing the past altogether” (“Facing History: Richter’s Somber Reflection,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025, p. 160).
Remembrance and historical memory would have been front of mind for Richter as he was working on the present work. A media furor erupted in 1995 over the planned removal of the artist’s 17. Oktober 1976 series from their long-term display at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main after the series was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Likewise, Richter pondered the series anew following the birth of his son in 1995. The artist viewed the S. mit Kind paintings as a private counterpart to the cycle: “the Baader-Meinhof cycle [17. Oktober 1976] consists of distant, hopeless pictures of death in the face of a utopia that has deteriorated into violence. In view of this tarnished utopia, S. mit Kind are paintings that arose out of private happiness, but also speak of the untruthfulness of everyday images and their necessary destruction, and of decay and death” (quoted in D. Elger, op. cit., p. 16). Mohn demonstrates Richter’s careful balancing of his private happiness and continual dwelling on decay and destruction within his celebrated abstract mode, the work poignantly revealing why Richter’s practice is considered to have “advanced to define painting in the present” (A. Rottmann, “Randomizing Painting: Notes on Richter’s Abstractions,” in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2020, p. 93).