“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.”
Presenting a magnificent vista of variegated abstraction and saturated hue, Abstraktes Bild from 1997 is an extraordinary exemplar of Gerhard Richter’s iconic Abstrakte Bilder, a series of paintings widely recognized as the preeminent venture in abstract art of the last fifty years. Even within this rarified group, Abstraktes Bild is indisputably one of the most visually striking and impressive paintings: towering at nearly eleven feet in both directions, Abstraktes Bild is one of only fifteen rare Abstraktes Bilder in this monumental square format and scale that the artist has produced to date, with other examples from the group held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Froehlich Collection in Stuttgart, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Cage cycle, on long-term loan to the Tate Modern in London.
Across the colossal surface, swathes of scarlet and burgundy pigment are pulled aside like gestural veils, revealing underlayers of glimmering blue, green, and even alabaster pigment, the exquisitely ornate surface superbly exhibiting Richter's command of medium, entirely innovative technique, and, most demonstrably in the present work, his unprecedented mastery of color. Here, we see the artist revel in the chance slippages of his signature squeegee tool, which Richter uses to simultaneously build and erode his mesmerizing surface. One of the last and largest canvases Richter executed in 1997, the present work is the first in a series of three monumental paintings from a limited cycle that Richter produced at the end of that year (numbered "849"). The artists initially painted the triad as a single monumental work, before choosing to split the painting into three sister works. Of the three, the present work is the only one remaining in private hands, with 849-2 held at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and 849-3 held in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Acquired directly from Anthony d’Offay Gallery following its debut exhibition there, present work has been held in the same prestigious private European collection for over two decades.
Sister Paintings of the Present Work in Prestigious Museum Collections
“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.’”
In Abstraktes Bild, Richter’s odyssey into the realm of pure abstraction unveils his most extreme engagement with the medium – a raw examination of the very nature of paint itself, as a physical substance in both original and manipulated forms. Embracing an element of automatism, Richter compounds the full force of kinetic energy into the painterly surface of Abstraktes Bild as he draws his far-reaching squeegee across the canvas, layer after layer. Alternating in direction, density of paint, viscosity of the dragged movements, and the drying times between each wipe, Richter indulges in an infinite and unknowable number of permutations borne out of the interaction between oil pigments. As Benjamin Buchloch noted: “With so many combinations, so many permutational relationships, there can’t be any harmonious chromatic order, or compositional either, because there are no ordered relations left either in the colour system or the spatial system” (Benjamin Buchloh quoted in: Benjamin Buchloch, ed., “An Interview with Gerhard Richter,” Gerhard Richter: October Files, Massachusetts 2009, pp. 23-24). It is in this way that Abstraktes Bild resembles a confluence of many paintings at once and exhibits the ultimate painterly palimpsest: the exuberant strata of paint bear the ghosts of previous accretions, of color juxtapositions obsessively applied, erased, remade, and obliterated over again.
Market Precedent: Large-Scale Examples of Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild
Abstraktes Bild [849-1] indeed bears witness to the battle that Richter wages with opposing aesthetic forces: where a finely articulated gradation sits underneath in the present work, horizontal veils of stuttering paint present a riposte to the vertical drag of the Richter’s squeegee. Inaugurated as early as 1976, Richter’s Abstraktes Bilder are defined by the streaked and smeared tides of once semi-liquid material fixed on their surface, which, in their unprecedented abstraction, represent the epic crescendo of the artist’s tireless aesthetic project. Throughout his career-long evolution of this series, Richter arrives at a total deconstruction of perception, privileging a sense of chaos. In the present work, the shadows of the paint’s former malleability remain caught in a perpetually dynamic stasis, punctuated by the staccato ridges, crests, and peaks to create the sense of pictorial distance. It is in this way that Richter arrives at the utter apex of the canvas via pandemonium. If it were the Old Masters of the High Renaissance who constructed linear perspective, the legendary Impressionists to distilled image into rippling color and light, the Cubists who shattered form and space, and the Abstract Expressionists who eschewed representation altogether, then it is in Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder that allows for the total massacre of paint on canvas – the ultimate destination of abstraction and the ingenious skepticism of the medium he has mastered in all facets.
“With so many combinations, so many permutational relationships, there can’t be any harmonious chromatic order, or compositional either, because there are no ordered relations left either in the colour system or the spatial system.”
While Richter’s earlier Photo Paintings fall away into abstraction, the Abstrakte Bilder series see the artist launch a critical breakthrough in his oeuvre as he returns to a suggestion of referentiality. Evoking a blurred image from the nebulous recesses of memory and imploring the same cognitive viewing experience as his photo works, the coagulation of endlessly scraped pigment counters the canon of abstraction by privileging the photographic, the mechanical, and the aleatory. Erupting with a crackling, distortive energy redolent within magmic smears of color, Abstraktes Bild's abstract field of chromatic variegation unmistakably bears the mark of televisual opticality. Having sought new ways to paint that rally against “redundant” figuration and the “inflated subjectivism, idealism, and existential weightlessness” of Modernist abstraction, Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder picture an assertion of abstract painting, not only in the face of photography which lies at the root of painting’s crisis, but also immersed in its postmodern digital glow (Peter Osborne, ‘Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter’s Negatives’,October, vol. 62, Autumn, 1992, p. 104). Hence our understanding of Abstraktes Bild’s richly layered surface is transformed – the shocking, gem-like glimpses of chartreuse, alabaster and vermilion which reveal themselves under weighty blankets of red and purple betray the earlier movements and decisions of Richter’s mind and squeegee, representing vestiges of the past of painting at large. The picture plane is the phantom product of relentless transformation, and in its presence, we are left only to wonder what was laid down on the canvases prior in an impossible exercise of visual excavation.
Incontestably one of the greatest ventures in Contemporary art, Abstraktes Bild combines the greatest stylistic fissures of Richter’s output with the discourse on the crisis of postmodern painting. In a 1986 interview with Buchloch, Richter explained, “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.” (the artist in: Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961 – 2007, London, 2009, p. 187) The work that followed, most superlatively in the present work, bore the consequential self-consciousness that signaled Richter at his very best: each daub of oil carries this goal in mind, and as such, Abstraktes Bild is charged by its very own perceptive breath. It is at once the birth of a new kind of painting and the death of a narrative past – both potential and kinetic energies, generation and destruction – in a feat of technique and invention that can only be rightfully labeled a masterpiece.
