Gerhard Richter

Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich
Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above in 1985)
Sotheby's, London, December 2, 1993, lot 51
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Ulrich Loock & Denys Zacharopoulus, Gerhard Richter, Munich, 1985, p. 88, illustrated
Jürgen Harten, ed., Gerhard Richter, Bilder 1962-1985, Cologne, 1986, cat. no. 508, p. 269, illustrated in color
Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 508, p. 174, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet For Moderne Kunst, Gerhard Richter: The Art of the Impossible-Paintings 1964-1998, 1999, p. 43, illustrated

“If I paint an abstract picture …  I neither know in advance what it is supposed to look like nor where I intend to go when I am painting, what could be done, to what end.” (Gerhard Richter in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Gerhard Richter, 1991, p. 116)

Gerhard Richter’s creative vision is one that is centered on the artist’s process and procedures, and how the mechanics of painting affect the dynamic and structure of composition. This, together with an on-going love affair with the physicality of paint, is nowhere more passionately displayed than in his Abstract Paintings. Executed in 1982, Tisch is a superlative example of this particular voice of the artist. Its extraordinary interplay of brilliant explosions of fizzing color with dynamic sequences of soft, undulating grounds, injects this painting with a visual momentum that is unsurpassed in works from this period.

Gerhard Richter’s transition from the Photopaintings to his Abstract Paintings is one, which, essentially, shapes itself as a shift from the figurative to the non-figurative. This is a rather simplified explanation, which does not do justice to the intellectual intricacies that inform Richter’s Abstract oeuvre. By making such a change, Richter presented himself with an aesthetic and conceptual challenge of the utmost significance. Previously, he was concerned with the deconstruction and re-presentation of a found photograph and its renaissance in oil paint, engaging the viewer, primarily, with both the dichotomy and nexus between perception and conception. With the Abstract paintings, we see Richter withdrawing from an object clarity (or deliberate manipulation), favouring, instead, a liberated painterly expression. For Richter, what he attempts to achieve with his Abstract works is the possibility of a project or a design: as he has said in an interview, he wants the works to not be “… didactic, not logical, but rather free and – however complicated – also effortless in appearance.” (Richter in “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986” in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London 1995, pp. 155-56).

If Richter’s oeuvre essentially revolves around this single quest to establish connections yet highlight distinctions between figuration and abstraction, rather than discontinue this investigation first established in the Photopaintings, the Abstract paintings expand upon it as they attempt to distil reality and objectivity. Where in the Photopaintings the model is the source photograph, in the Abstract paintings the paradigm is fictitious because “… they illustrate a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can infer.” (Richter in Exh. Cat., Documenta 7: Gerhard Richter, 1982, n.p.) As such, the Abstract paintings have an elastic quality to them, both physically and intellectually. Physically, because of the way that Richter seems to stretch paint around the canvas, eking every possibility out of the medium he employs; intellectually, because they are not grounded to any narrative, and so they thus fuel the imagination of the viewer. Shapes and colors come together to form a drama that is completely at the behest of the viewer’s own eye and consciousness.

Tisch robustly displays the choreography of paint for which the Abstracts are so admired. Such manipulation is the product of Richter’s chief concern with process. Here, he uses wet and dry brushes, long spatulas and ‘squeegee boards’ to apply the oil paint with a myriad of different free, sweeping movements. He thus achieves structural qualities that have the suggestive characteristics of musical compositions: some passages display the largo of a slower movement, others are more frenetic cacophonies of color and brushstroke. In any case, Richter’s Tisch seems to translate paint into assonances and dissonances, just as modern composers like Schönberg composed music. The present work was executed during a period where ‘painting’ had just re-emerged as a force in the post-war canon. It is an electrifying example of this painterly and intellectual elasticity that so marks Richter’s Abstract work. Collisions of midnight blue confront exotic flurries of sunny yellows and veils of deep red and orange marks that seem to shower off of the right half of the composition. Tisch is a truly remarkable example of Richter’s bravura technique and capacities and stands out as one of the artist’s most impressive contributions to his continued investigation into the nature of process.