Gerhard Richter

Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1982

Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, Georg Baselitz – Gerhard Richter, 1981, n.p., illustrated in colour
Bielefeld, Kunsthalle; Mannheim, Kunstverein, Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder 1976-1981, 1982
Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle; Berlin, Nationalgalerie; Bern, Kunsthalle; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst/Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Gerhard Richter: Bilder/Paintings 1962-1985, 1986, p. 239, no. 467-5, illustrated in colour
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Bonn, Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Gerhard Richter, 1993-1994, p. 79, illustrated in colour
Bolzano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Gerhard Richter – Malerei/Pittura, 1996, n.p., no. 25, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel, Documenta 7, Vol. I, 1982, p. 85, illustrated
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 467-5, illustrated in colour

 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original with the salmon undertones tending more towards bright pink and the red to cherry in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is some very minor superficial dust adhering to the surface. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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"Accustomed to recognising real things in paintings, we refuse, justifiably, to consider colour alone (in all its variation) as what the painting reveals, and instead allow ourselves to see the unseeable, that which has never been seen before and indeed is not visible... Thus paintings are all the better, the more beautiful, intelligent, crazy and extreme, the more clearly perceptible and the less decipherable metaphors they are for this incomprehensible reality. Art is the highest form of hope."
(the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel, Documenta 7, 1982, Vol. 1, p. 443)

Executed in 1981, Abstraktes Bild is one of Gerhard Richter's earliest colour abstract paintings. Beneath the striking field of pink, red, peach and orange, bisected by bold strokes of blue and yellow, glimpses of grey can be seen. These dark flashes betray the earlier presence of one of Richter's Grau paintings, over which the artist has dramatised his transition from monochrome simplicity to technicolour expression.

The interplay of hues and the complex coating of malleable oil across the surface of  Abstraktes Bild are deliberately ambiguous, seeming both to reveal and conceal at the same time: the viewer is invited both to look at, and through, the layers of pigment due to the hues being simultaneously unveiled and hidden. The warm colours seem to glide across the surface, enshrouding the Grau canvas beneath in a beautiful layer of tromp-l'oeil which lends the painting an intriguing sense of depth.

Richter's working practice for his Abstract Paintings has been described as remarkably methodical: he begins by placing a number of white primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several of them simultaneously and re-working them until they are completely harmonised. Tracts of colour are dragged across the canvas using a squeegee, so that the various strains of malleable, semi-liquid pigment suspended in oil are fused together and smudged first into the canvas, and then layered on top of each other as the paint strata accumulate. The painting undergoes multiple variations in which each new accretion brings colour and textural juxtapositions until they are completed, as Richter himself declares, "there is no more that I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with' (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 108).  This process necessitates a lengthy production as the role of time obviates the dominance of a single creative identity: Richter's abstract works become truly the summation of a creative journey, trapping in their layers the shadows of wrought experience.

The cool, flat surface of Abstraktes Bild, with its mesmerising colouring, painterly gestures and mellifluous shapes, has a compelling spectral quality. The diversity of Richter's approaches within a single canvas reveals the tension between his physical enjoyment of paint and the intellectual analysis its manipulation requires. For Richter, the art of painting is both a deeply problematic and moral obligation. Aside from being a compulsive channel for personal expression, it is a means for him to explore the easily overlooked concepts of perception, ideology and belief, through which we construct the world surrounding us. As with his photobased paintings, which underline the role of pictures in understanding the fictive nature of reality, his abstract paintings alternately confront the problems of representation and sidestep such aesthetic issues completely. "Every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model.... Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualise a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality, the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have developed it in terms of substitute images like heaven and hell, gods and devils." (Gerhard Richter in Exhibition Catalogue, Documenta 7: Gerhard Richter, 1982, n.p)

Abstraktes Bild perfectly embodies Richter's theory of Abstraction that "there is no order, everything is dissolved, [it is] more revolutionary, anarchistic' (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 108). His abstract paintings are designed to have a non-identity whereby the total deconstruction of perception – interrogating and dismantling themes of representation, illusion, communication – becomes a sublime chaos. As such they commune an emotional relationship with the viewer and become themselves experience rather than object.  As Roald Nasgaard writes, "The character of the Abstract Paintings is not their resolution but the dispersal of their elements, their co-existing contradictory expressions and moods, their opposition of promises and denials. They are complex visual events, suspended in interrogation, and "fictive models" for that reality which escapes direct address, eludes description and conceptualization, but resides inarticulate in our experience" (Roald Nasgaard in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 110).