Gerhard Richter in his studio at Düsseldorf, 1981. Photo ©  Brigitte Hellgoth / AKG Images. Art © 2023 Gerhard Richter
“What I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom.”
Gerhard Richter in conversation with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Eds., Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961 – 2007, London 2009, p. 187

A singularly stunning and jewel-like example of Gerhard Richter’s iconic squeegee crafted abstractions from 1990, the very apex of his seminal 1988 – 1992 period of production, Abstraktes Bild 721-4 features a riotous combination of colors from across the spectrum and a rigorous and distinctive orthogonal composition.

The Abstraktes Bilder series represent Richter’s profound rebuttal to the New York School’s brand of post-war modernism and his singular contribution to the canon of abstract painting. In its lush, seductive surface, the present work exemplifies Richter’s deft use of new tools, in particular the squeegee, to explore a new frontier in abstraction. Arguably the most sought-after and highly lauded European painter of his generation, Richter’s sharp intellect and painterly talents are nowhere more evident than in his Abstrakte Bilder, which rank amongst the most pivotal developments in abstract painting of the last century. In Richter's pantheon of small-scale Abstrakte Bilder paintings, the present work represents the very pinnacle of his output.

Left: YVES KLEIN, UNTITLED (FIRE-COLOR PAINTING), 1962. IMAGE © THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART/LICENSED BY SCALA / ART RESOURCE, NY. ART © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Right: Claude Monet, San Giorgio Maggiore by Twilight, 1908. National Museum Wales. Image © National Museums & Galleries of Wales / Bridgeman Images 

In the 1960s, Gerhard Richter emerged as a realist painter whose reproductions of images drawn from both the mass media and family photographs frequently employed a dragged blur that anticipated his use of the squeegee in his later abstracts. In thus arriving full circle from his earliest Photo Paintings, Abstraktes Bild alludes to a blurred or half-seen image and imploring the same cognitive viewing experience as Richter’s earlier works. Having been exhibited in Anthony d’Offay Gallery’s 1991 exhibition, Gerhard Richter: Mirrors, and acquired directly from the gallery shortly after, the present work has esteemed provenance, remaining in the same collection for over 30 years. Importantly displayed amongst other significant Abstrakte Bilder, the present work was also accompanied by 4 Panes of Glass, Richter’s first ever glass work. The reflective surface of the glass is similarly evinced in the painterly sheen of the present work, shifting the nature of perception.

Willem de Kooning, Collage, 1950. Sold at Sotheby’s New York, 2022 for $33.6 million. Art © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Abstraktes Bild evokes powerful emotions from its many layers and hues uncovered and sometimes overpainted by vertical and horizontal drags of the squeegee, with passages of brilliant scarlet, cerulean, cobalt, and violet under and over bright yellow, purple, white and gray. In the slight impasto, we can see the full range of this series’ distinct — and sui generis — surfaces. The sheen of immaculate color and endless permutations mimic the aesthetic of a Cibachrome print, while a distinctly photographic quality is compounded by the out-of-focus consistency of sweeping accretions of paint. Richter’s intense manipulation of the surface in Abstraktes Bild conjures a sensation of infinite paint layering.

Abstraktes Bild is simultaneously an acknowledgment and cancellation of the image space pioneered by the abstracts of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. The work’s a tactile physicality is in some ways reminiscent of the gestural movement of American action painters, and yet the exuberant strata of paint bear the ghosts of previous accretions and color juxtapositions that Richter has applied, erased, remade, and obliterated again and again, rebutting the boldness and idealism of 1950s New York. The paradox of at once accreting paint and at the same time effacing it with his drag of the squeegee brings forth a rich tactility of symphonic color and delivers a panorama of hues presenting a sparring of opposites within flattened layers of pictorial space. “What I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom”, said the artist. (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Eds., Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961 – 2007, London 2009, p. 187)

Market Precedent: Gem-scale examples of Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild

“A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is any ‘good’ it concerns us – transcending ideology – as art that we consider worth the trouble of defending (perceiving, showing, making). It is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich ‘today.’”
Gerhard Richter quoted in: Dietmar Elger, “Landscape as a Model,” in Exh. Cat., Hanover, Sprengel Museum, Gerhard Richter: Landscapes, 1998, p. 12.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, 1986. Sold at Sotheby’s London, 2015 for $46.4 million. Art © 2023 Gerhard Richter

The deployment of texture, structure, and gesture in Abstraktes Bild deliberately “suspends itself between scientific and expressive conceptions of painterly process. It is oscillating with the same deliberation, between painting as an act and painting as an accident, between composition as a result of mere chance encounters of materials and structures, and composition as the tracing of a subject’s residual intentionality” (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Working on the Picture: The Discretion of Gerhard Richter” in Exh. Cat., Cologne, Museum of Ludwig and Munich, Haus der Kunst, Gerhard Richter Large Abstracts, 2009, p. 11). Ultimately, the blunt tool of the squeegee dictates the composition, the skips and slippages inherent to the process informing the end result. “This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture”, explains Richter, “each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: It has to emerge as if inevitably.” (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Sabine Schutz in Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Eds., Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961 – 2007, London 2009, p. 256)