Gerhard Richter

Harald Falckenberg, Hamburg
Acquired directly from 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. 84, illustrated
Venice, German Pavillion, XXXVI Biennale Internazionale dell' Arte, 1972, p. 59, no. 59, illustrated (titled 12 Tubes)
Essen, Museum Folkwang, Die Maler und ihre Skulpturen. Von Edgar Degas bis Gerhard Richter, 1997, p. 299, illustrated
Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste, Sammlung Falckenberg, 1999, p. 101, illustrated in colour
Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter. Images After Image, 2005, p. 38, illustrated in colour

Jürgen Harten, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, p. 27, illustrated (titled 12 Tubes)
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, cat. no. 59, illustrated (titled 12 Tubes)

Affirmed by the artist's catalogue raisonné as the first sculptural work in his oeuvre, the iconic 8 Tubes constitutes a seminal moment in Gerhard Richter's career and was one of the centrepieces of his contribution to the German pavillion at the XXXVI Venice Biennale in 1972. Indeed, in over fifty years working as an artist, he has made only a small number of three-dimensional sculptures, of which the present work is not only the earliest but also one of the strongest manifestations. Here Richter crystallises his enquiry into reality and illusion, familiar from both his paintings based on photographs and the later abstract works. And yet the sculptural plasticity of 8 Tubes literally adds another dimension to an exploration he had hitherto conducted exclusively in paint.

Richter began to examine in more concrete terms the instability of our perceptions of reality by painting shadows onto four cardboard tubes in 1965. While these have not been preserved, the extant 8 Tubes have been suspended from museum ceilings throughout Europe and widely reproduced in recognition of their importance within the artist's oeuvre. Made of water pipes in 1968, the present tubes have been furnished with static shadows, painted onto them in grisaille monochrome, in addition to casting "real" shadows of their own as they are suspended from the ceiling by transparent nylon threads. The harmony of their composition belies the conceptual complexity of this work. Reality and illusion, incontrovertible fact and subjective interpretation become inseparable.

This work is the result of Richter's pure and objective investigation into the causes and effects of visual cognition, as well as his first foray into sculpture, and therefore any interference in the semiotic dynamic between signifier and referent, including colour, has been eradicated. The binary black and white palette works differently depending on the viewer's focus: for the individual tube it focuses the eye while for the tubes collectively it instigates a disorientating pattern that plays on the retina and is startlingly reminiscent of the contemporaneous black and white Op Art of Bridget Riley.

Extremely rare, 8 Tubes was created shortly after Richter's appointment as guest lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg the previous year. He had begun to transpose photography into painting in 1962 and staged the Demonstration in Favour of Capitalist Realism together with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg in 1963. The following year, Richter's first solo exhibitions were held at the galleries of Heiner Friedrich in Munich and Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf. However, it was the second half of the 1960s, with 8 Tubes at its heart that 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 divergent artistic ideologies from Abstraction to Conceptualism to Minimalism.

Together with Richter's clear interest in ideas of perception and illusion, the rich vein of enquiry in 8 Tubes also interrogates highly significant themes of repetition and multiplication. Indeed the present work represents a new conceptual departure in Richter's work, the boldness and scope of which lay the foundations for a subsequent output that is world-renowned for its stunning diversity. It was the catalyst for a string of subsequent masterpieces. In 1966 he made his first experiments painting colour charts with the Farben and Farbtafel whereby he became more aware of the pictorial proximity between the figurative and the abstract, leading him towards a more complex conceptual approach. In 1967 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, painting Corrugated Iron and the largest of his curtain paintings. Indeed, the present work is a transposition into three dimensions of the celebrated curtain paintings and he has subverted the genre of the found-object by applying the principles of what Duchamp had labelled "retinal art". Furthermore, the similarities between 8 Tubes and American Minimalism are striking and Richter was inevitably aware of the aesthetic and theoretical parallels. However, the present work once again demonstrates his 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 incarnation of experimentation: it does not fall under any single ideological label and evades restrictive categorisation. In precisely its refusal to be defined singularly it is the embodiment of Richter's insatiable desire to push the boundaries of what his art can achieve.