Gerhard Richter

Collection Dobermann, Münster
Galerie Thomas Borgmann, Cologne
Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Junge deutsche Künstler. 14 x 14, 1968
Aachen, Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst, Gerhard Richter, Gegenverkehr, 1969, no. 82, illustrated
Münster, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Sammlung Dobermann, 1973

Jürgen Harten, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, p. 66, no. 161, illustrated as part of an installation
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 161, illustrated as part of an installation

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is less green throughout and closer to black and white in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. From left to right: (i) There is a pin-head sized loss towards the top centre edge and light rubbing to the extreme tip of the upper left corner. There is a media accretion towards the lower left edge. There is a very faint rub mark in the lower right corner. Examined under ultra-violet light, there is a small spot of restoration to the extreme tip of the lower right corner. (ii) There is a very faint horizontal rub mark along the bottom lower left edge and minor rubbing towards the centre of the right edge. There is a very small paint loss towards the upper left edge and rubbing to the extreme tip of the upper right corner. Towards the lower right corner there is a hairline crack. Examined under ultra-violet light there are small spots of restoration towards the bottom right corner and a further spot to the centre of the right hand edge. (iii) There is rubbing along the top centre edge. There is a very faint small drip mark towards the left bottom edge. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light. (iv) There is a very small paint loss along the extreme top right edge and rubbing to the extreme tip of the upper left corner. There is a very thin vertical media accretion towards the centre. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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The canvases of Corrugated Iron comprise one of the most dramatic and earliest breakthroughs in the whole of Gerhard Richter's prodigious and multifaceted oeuvre. In scope, dimension, and design the project of this work was unprecedented in his output when it was conceived in 1967. Yet its execution, which immediately followed the unique sculptural installation 4 Panes of Glass, precipitated a period of staggeringly bold experimentation and diversification, which over five decades has come to be the most defining trait of this giant of contemporary art. Indeed, the period of 1966-69, with Corrugated Iron at its heart, witnessed Richter's transformation from the subversive exponent of a European brand of Pop "Photo-painting" to the self-determining pioneer of unconstrained experimentation, traversing a plethora of artistic ideologies from Abstraction to Conceptualism to Minimalism.

 

The present work consists of four of the eight panels that composed an initial installation before it was broken up. Of the four other panels, two are now part of the Frieder Burda Collection in Baden-Baden and two were included, until very recently, in the Olbricht Collection in Essen. As such, Corrugated Iron includes the only panel where the lines of corrugation are exactly horizontal as well as the other various angles of striation. Richter's subsequent Wellblech or Corrugated Iron work consists of just two panels and possesses the organised compositional interdependency of a diptych. However, this is not the case in the present work, where the panels both interrelate and exist independently of each other. The canvases of the installation are interchangeable and exchangeable, which represents a key conceptual characteristic in Richter's burgeoning artistic ideology.

 

This painting was executed at the moment when Richter's mature artistic vision began to become abundantly clear: now his philosophy would branch out to encompass disparate styles of making art as he attempted to develop other models for the examination of visual perception. Here was an artist who, perhaps more than anyone else in art history, was expanding the painterly form to attempt to come to terms with the simple notion of looking; someone who was trying to uncover the elusiveness of reality. As such, he began to embark on a creative odyssey which would embrace as many styles as possible, in his attempt to understand our view of reality. During this time he developed the 'Colour charts' further into pure abstraction, the 'Curtain' series, the 'Panes of Glass', the 'Mirror' paintings, the 'Grey' paintings, the first 'Abstract' paintings, the 'Cityscapes' and, of course, the 'Mountain-scapes'. All of these approaches represented, in their different ways, direct examinations of the mechanics of visual communication.

 

Corrugated Iron extends Richter's well-developed Photo-painting inasmuch as the naturalistic accuracy of the subject means Corrugated Iron could very well have been sourced in a photograph. The paradigm of Photo-painting as an object and as a technique, which had by this time comprised virtually his entire canon, had been resolved through a catalogue of beautifully rendered works portraying loaded subjects in scintillating gradations of black and white. The use of colour had been rescinded because Richter felt it interfered with the dynamic between Image and Index, and this vestige of tonal duality is well-suited to the subject of galvanised metal. Richter pursued monochrome initially in order to focus the eye, yet ironically here the all-encompassing total-field pattern scatters the focus of the retina producing a disorientating Op effect similar to that of early works by Bridget Riley. The way in which Richter has cropped this image so that it becomes a quasi-abstract schema, discernible in subject only via its title, presciently precursors his later enlargements of photographs to produce the famous "Photo-Abstract" paintings in which close-ups of paint surfaces are exactly rendered but enlarged to a monumental scale to appear abstract.

 

While looking back to his own precedent, Corrugated Iron also represents a new conceptual departure in Richter's painting. He had made his first experiments painting colour charts the previous year with the Farben and Farbtafel of 1966. In painting a depiction of a paint sample card, he became much more aware of the pictorial proximity between the figurative and the abstract which led him towards a more complex conceptual approach to the canvas. Was the viewer looking at a mere re-presentation of a DIY shop colour chart, or was the painting before him more involved in the colour relationships which were the foundation of abstract painting? 1967 was a year of prodigious invention and witnessed Richter running the full of spectrum of artistic enquiry. He painted two sequences of life-size open doors, 5 Türen I and 5 Türen II, in a graphically illustrative style, before creating the iconic 4 Glasscheiben sculpture, in which large sheets of glass swing on a central axis between vertical poles, and then finally painting Corrugated Iron and the largest of his curtain paintings. Together with Richter's clear interest in ideas of perception and illusion, the rich vein of enquiry in these works also interrogates highly significant themes of repetition and multiplication, which found its full expression in the repeating lines of Corrugated Iron.

 

Robert Storr has noted that Corrugated Iron encapsulates a spirit of new adventure as one of "two polyptychs of corrugated metal in which [Richter] used the simple technique of shading to suggest low relief in what are nevertheless essentially abstract, almost Op-art, compositions", although it can also be considered clearly in relation to Conceptualism, as well as the artist's growing interest in Minimalism (Robert Storr in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2002, p. 49). In October 1967 Konrad Fischer opened his first gallery just around the corner from the Düsseldorf Art Academy and showcased works by Carl Andre for the event. Richter met Andre at the opening of that exhibition and went on to have six exhibitions at Fischer's gallery, as well as producing the very first of his "Grey" paintings the following year in 1968. The similarities between Corrugated Iron and contemporaneous works by the American minimalists, most obviously Frank Stella, are striking and Richter was inevitably aware of the aesthetic and theoretical parallels. However, the present work once again demonstrates Richter's singular and incomparable capacity to forge his own ideological identity. This is not merely his own brand of Minimalism, just as it is not only his interpretation of established strains of abstraction or Conceptualism. This work is the quintessence of experimentation: it does not fall under any single ideological label and evades restrictive categorisation. In precisely its refusal to be defined singularly as Photo-, abstract, conceptual or minimalist painting it is both all of these and the embodiment of Richter's insatiable desire to push the boundaries of what his art can achieve.