“Richter’s painting explores the enigmatic juncture of sense and non-sense. His paintings encircle, enclose the real as that which it is impossible to say: the unrepresentable”
Executed in resplendent tones of emerald, ruby, mauve, and white, Abstraktes Bild stands among the most compelling achievements in Gerhard Richter’s epoch-defining Abstrakte Bilder series. Painted in 1992, a year widely regarded as a pinnacle in his five-decade engagement with abstraction, this dazzling composition channels the full force of Richter’s mature squeegee technique into a jewel-like canvas of arresting complexity and crystalline precision. One of only four works Richter painted that year at this intimate scale, another of which is housed in the permanent collection of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Abstraktes Bild is a rare embodiment of the painter’s extraordinary control over color, texture, and chance.
The early 1990s marked a particularly fertile period in Richter’s career, culminating in the Golden Lion award at the 1992 Venice Biennale. That same year, he produced a number of major Abstrakte Bilder now held by institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Within this distinguished context, the present work stands out as a model of compositional clarity and philosophical depth. Its vertical format and domestic scale lend the work an architectural intimacy, while the dynamic interplay of layered pigment and effacement generates a quiet, meditative rhythm. It is a painting that rewards slow looking—a surface alive with sedimentary accumulation, glinting color, and tactile interruptions.
Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild from 1992 in Museum Collections
Richter’s abstraction does not emerge from expressive spontaneity but from an intricate process of construction and erasure. With the hard edge of a homemade squeegee, he drags semi-liquid pigment across the canvas in successive layers. Each gesture fuses, dissects, or effaces the colors beneath, yielding a surface that is both immediate and elusive. Brilliant whites stretch across deep purples, while vivid emeralds are buried beneath rich umbers; passages of intense color alternate with subtle veils, producing a sense of simultaneous depth and flatness. This dense chromatic layering destabilizes traditional figure-ground relationships and confounds the eye’s attempts to locate a single point of recession. As viewers, we are forced to continually adjust, our perception undone and remade by every movement across the painting’s luminous skin.
The process by which Abstraktes Bild came into being reflects Richter’s radical embrace of chance. “I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned,” the artist explained in 1990. “This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction... never produces a predetermined picture... I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself.” (Gerhard Richter, interview with Dorothea Dietrich, 1990, in Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965-2004, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, p. 36). Throughout the execution of Abstraktes Bild, layers of pigment were applied, scraped away, and reworked—sometimes partially, sometimes completely—until the composition arrived at an unexpected yet irrevocable resolution. What appears effortless is in fact the result of cerebral labor, of conscious restraint and relinquishment of control. The squeegee, in Richter’s hands, becomes a paradoxical tool: one of creation and erasure, of intuition and interruption.
“This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction... never produces a predetermined picture... I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself.”
Right: Peter Doig, The Architect’s Home in the Ravine, 1991. Private Collection. Art © 2025 Peter Doig / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In this way, the painting is a record of time. Each accretion and removal leaves a trace, building a topography of touch and thought. Like the palimpsest of a memory that can never be fully retrieved, Abstraktes Bild bears witness to what was, what might have been, and what remains. Art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has described Richter’s abstractions as “perpetual cancellations”—compositions in which every possibility is presented and immediately negated (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed., Gerhard Richter: October Files, MIT Press, 2009, pp. 23–24). In this state of flux, the work achieves an intensity that recalls natural phenomena without ever describing them. We are reminded of cascading waterfalls, geological strata, auroras, or stained-glass windows—not through representation, but through resonance. In Richter’s hands, abstraction becomes a form of seeing that bypasses language and opens onto something elemental, even spiritual.
That these works seem to flicker between abstraction and figuration is no accident. In contrast to the overt referentiality of his earlier photo paintings, Richter’s abstractions elicit an elusive sense of familiarity. Their organic rhythms and chromatic tensions evoke the natural world, while simultaneously refusing the comforts of narrative or symbol. As Birgit Pelzer has argued, Richter’s abstract works “prove that which cannot be articulated” (Birgit Pelzer, in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist, London, 1995, p. 124). They are not depictions of things, but propositions—acts of philosophical inquiry, where meaning is suspended between appearance and disappearance.
Indeed, Abstraktes Bild stands as a visual analogue to Richter’s lifelong interrogation of image, memory, and truth. Having lived through the trauma of World War II and the rise and fall of East German communism, Richter has long questioned the reliability of representation. His abstraction does not seek to escape this history, but to confront it obliquely: to test what painting can still mean in an age of media saturation and political fracture. “It’s not about inventing pictures,” Richter once said, “but about finding them” (Gerhard Richter, Notes 1985, in Obrist, The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 119). In this context, Abstraktes Bild is less a picture than a process—an emergent structure in which thought and material collide.
The extraordinary power of Abstraktes Bild lies in this interplay between presence and absence, intuition and control. In its vertical striations and chromatic veils, we glimpse the tension between painterly gesture and visual perception, between surface and depth, opacity and transparency. As Robert Storr has noted, Richter’s abstractions “recast the terms of modernist painting while calling its utopian premises into question” (Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002). Rather than pursue a single ideal, Richter opens the canvas to contingency, allowing the painting to find its own equilibrium. The result is a work that feels at once meticulous and mysterious, deliberate and divine.
In the canon of contemporary abstraction, Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder represents a turning point—a series that redefined the possibilities of painting at the turn of the millennium. They carry forward the legacy of Abstract Expressionism while dispensing with its mythologies. Their surfaces are dense with memory and thought, and their chromatic intricacy resists simplification. Abstraktes Bild, painted at the height of this pivotal period, encapsulates the restless brilliance of Richter’s achievement. It is not merely a painting, but a field of vision: a shifting constellation of color, time, and perception, forever in motion.
