Gerhard Richter

Galerie Bernd Lutze, Friedrichshafen
Christie's, New York, May 5, 1993, Lot 205
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter, Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, no. 654-1, illustrated

This work is in excellent condition. There are no condition problems with this work. Framed.
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Of all the artists working within the realm of painting in the post-war period, none are more dynamic nor varied in their approach to the canvas than Gerhard Richter. His oeuvre stands out as one of the most variegated in terms of images, yet cohesive in terms of content. The black-and-white Photopaintings of the early 1960s; the Color Charts of the 1960s and 1970s; the Abstract Paintings; the Grey Paintings and his return to the Photopaintings in color in the 1980s: all of these differing voices express the same concern with the boundaries of the canvas and the limits of paint.

Throughout his process, Richter employed the same techniques used in his earlier representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. Spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving and subtracting paint create an illusion of space. Despite unnatural palettes, sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist's tools, the Abstract Paintings often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside, just as in his representational paintings; there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In his Abstract Paintings, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.

Richter's Abstract Paintings are clearly his most spontaneous, visually complex, and emotionally evocative works, perpetuating the tradition of Modernist painting. 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 Abstraktes Bild (654/1).

"If I paint an abstract picture (the problems are not dissimilar with the other works) 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. For this reason the painting is a quasi blind, desperate effort, like that made by someone who has been cast out into a completely incomprehensible environment with no means of support - by someone who has a reasonable range of tools, materials and abilities and the urgent desire to build something meaningful and useful, but it cannot be a house or a chair or anything else that can be named, and therefore just starts building in the vague hope that his correct, expert activity will finally produce something correct and meaningful." (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Gerhard Richter, 1991, p. 116)

 

QUOTE

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting.
Gerhard Richter (Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, Cambridge, 1995, p.78.)