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拍品专文
Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (2009) is an exceptional late work by the celebrated German painter, one of only a few works where ethereal white almost completely blankets the canvas. The work witnesses Richter at his most elemental and metaphysical, achieving through his most celebrated technique a poignant and philosophical reflection on art and nature. Abstraktes Bild emerges from Richter’s decades-long interest in landscape, and exhibits the artist blending the two genres—landscape and abstraction—into a singular painting. “If the Abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still lifes show my yearning,” Richter once proclaimed, yet here, the artist reveals both his reality and his metaphysical yearning (quoted in D. Elger, “Introduction: 1994-2006,” in Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 4, Ostfildern, 2015, p. 17).
Opaque layers of white coat underlying fields of green, blue, and red like veils of mist and snow against a verdant mountaintop in Abstraktes Bild. The intricate movement of the paint across the surface of the canvas—vertical and horizontal swipes which waver and dip, in contradistinction to the artist’s more common steady horizontal movement of the squeegee—reveals the more naturalistic undercurrents of the present work. Discussing the artistic legacies which he feels connected to, Richter relayed, “I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich” (quoted in “Conversation with Paolo Vagheggi, 1999,” in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, New York, 2009, p. 347). The present work potently reflects this connection, the dominant white palette with hints of green undergrowth particularly evoking Friedrich’s Morning Mist in the Mountains (1808, Thüringer Landesmuseum Heidecksburg).
Richter revitalizes and reinterprets old motifs across his oeuvre, reviving series from previous decades into new forms. The present work thus finds its genesis in the long series of landscapes that the artist began in 1989, the first year he began to take yearly sojourns to the alpine village Sils in the Upper Engadin region of Switzerland. This faraway locale brought him in direct contact with the dramatic landscapes which initiated the Romantic movement and enthralled the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who maintained a cottage in Sils. Discussing the long gestation of Richter’s white paintings, the curator Martin Germann identifies as particularly important two landscapes from 1999, Gehöft (Farm) and Schnee (Snow), which inaugurate for the coming millennia Richter’s fascination with the subject. Germann writes that “what these two landscapes share is the absence of any pictorial beyond. What is foregrounded is the snow, and with it nature itself… as Dieter Schwarz notes, Farm (and Snow) anticipate the all-white paintings of the end of the first decade of the century” (M. Germann, “the Painting of Gerhard Richter on the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025, p. 200).
Richter’s Alpine retreat brought him close to the Sublime ideal first articulated in Friedrich’s paintings then parroted in Nietzsche’s philosophy. An early ardent proponent of the Sublime, Mark Rothko, cited these two Germans as foundational to his metaphysical conception. Discussing Rothko’s Sublime, Richter noted: “Certainly, I too want that quantity in general for my work, and to touch the world. But my interest only parallels Rothko; I am not influenced. His metaphysical aspirations are found in all great art. Besides, the mystery and incomprehensibility of Rothko’s paintings are based on the specificity of the structure, the transcendental effects and the viewer’s contemplation. The aesthetic experience in my abstract paintings is not metaphysical in the sense of being religious. Only the structure of my works is so complicated and difficult that they are incomprehensible also. If you want, you may call it metaphysical” (quoted in “Interview with Mark Rosenthal, 1998,” in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds., op. cit., p. 330).
Germann describes how over the decades Richter spent refining his abstract paintings, “the rhythmically recurring periods of closing, sealing, and opening the canvas spread over the next thirty years refined them, repeatedly touching on aspects of monochrome painting—as seen in the white paintings of 2009, for example—while negating any clear categorization as a colored palimpsest” (M. Germann, op. cit., p. 204). The present work is thus a final result of Richter’s long career spent querying abstraction. The gleaming white top layer of the work almost disguises the chromatic complexity awaiting underneath. While summering for the last time in Sils, Nietzsche began work on his final work, his autobiography Ecce Homo. In his preface, the philosopher writes, “Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks—the seeking—out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban” (Ecce Homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, London, 1911, p. 3). Paralleling Nietzsche, Richter’s Abstraktes Bild represents the artist’s own discoveries in the mountain peaks, revealing in an abstracted landscape his own vision of the metaphysical.
Opaque layers of white coat underlying fields of green, blue, and red like veils of mist and snow against a verdant mountaintop in Abstraktes Bild. The intricate movement of the paint across the surface of the canvas—vertical and horizontal swipes which waver and dip, in contradistinction to the artist’s more common steady horizontal movement of the squeegee—reveals the more naturalistic undercurrents of the present work. Discussing the artistic legacies which he feels connected to, Richter relayed, “I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich” (quoted in “Conversation with Paolo Vagheggi, 1999,” in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, New York, 2009, p. 347). The present work potently reflects this connection, the dominant white palette with hints of green undergrowth particularly evoking Friedrich’s Morning Mist in the Mountains (1808, Thüringer Landesmuseum Heidecksburg).
Richter revitalizes and reinterprets old motifs across his oeuvre, reviving series from previous decades into new forms. The present work thus finds its genesis in the long series of landscapes that the artist began in 1989, the first year he began to take yearly sojourns to the alpine village Sils in the Upper Engadin region of Switzerland. This faraway locale brought him in direct contact with the dramatic landscapes which initiated the Romantic movement and enthralled the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who maintained a cottage in Sils. Discussing the long gestation of Richter’s white paintings, the curator Martin Germann identifies as particularly important two landscapes from 1999, Gehöft (Farm) and Schnee (Snow), which inaugurate for the coming millennia Richter’s fascination with the subject. Germann writes that “what these two landscapes share is the absence of any pictorial beyond. What is foregrounded is the snow, and with it nature itself… as Dieter Schwarz notes, Farm (and Snow) anticipate the all-white paintings of the end of the first decade of the century” (M. Germann, “the Painting of Gerhard Richter on the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025, p. 200).
Richter’s Alpine retreat brought him close to the Sublime ideal first articulated in Friedrich’s paintings then parroted in Nietzsche’s philosophy. An early ardent proponent of the Sublime, Mark Rothko, cited these two Germans as foundational to his metaphysical conception. Discussing Rothko’s Sublime, Richter noted: “Certainly, I too want that quantity in general for my work, and to touch the world. But my interest only parallels Rothko; I am not influenced. His metaphysical aspirations are found in all great art. Besides, the mystery and incomprehensibility of Rothko’s paintings are based on the specificity of the structure, the transcendental effects and the viewer’s contemplation. The aesthetic experience in my abstract paintings is not metaphysical in the sense of being religious. Only the structure of my works is so complicated and difficult that they are incomprehensible also. If you want, you may call it metaphysical” (quoted in “Interview with Mark Rosenthal, 1998,” in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds., op. cit., p. 330).
Germann describes how over the decades Richter spent refining his abstract paintings, “the rhythmically recurring periods of closing, sealing, and opening the canvas spread over the next thirty years refined them, repeatedly touching on aspects of monochrome painting—as seen in the white paintings of 2009, for example—while negating any clear categorization as a colored palimpsest” (M. Germann, op. cit., p. 204). The present work is thus a final result of Richter’s long career spent querying abstraction. The gleaming white top layer of the work almost disguises the chromatic complexity awaiting underneath. While summering for the last time in Sils, Nietzsche began work on his final work, his autobiography Ecce Homo. In his preface, the philosopher writes, “Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks—the seeking—out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban” (Ecce Homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, London, 1911, p. 3). Paralleling Nietzsche, Richter’s Abstraktes Bild represents the artist’s own discoveries in the mountain peaks, revealing in an abstracted landscape his own vision of the metaphysical.