Gerhard Richter

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Private Collection, London
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in circa 2001

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter Mirrors, 1991, n.p., no. 3, illustrated in colour

Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, n.p., no. 713-4, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned...I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself"

The artist interviewed in 1990 in: Hubertus Butin, Stefan Gronert, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Eds, Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Verlag Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 36

Executed in 1990, the serene polychromatic expanse of Abstraktes Bild provides a stunning exemplar of Gerhard Richter's epic corpus of Abstract Painting. The interplay of hues and the complex layering of impasto are deliberately ambiguous, apparently both revealing and concealing the painting to the viewer. We simultaneously look both at and through the laminas of material as colours are unveiled and hidden in perfect equilibrium. Richter creates a sublime horizontal effect with glossy layers of blues and greens smeared on the surface and blended together over a ground of pale ochre with accents of oranges and yellows before being partially pulled away. This sublime work perfectly unites chromatic resonance, lyrical yet chaotic composition, and a certain aesthetic romance that is archetypal of Gerhard Richter's illustrious abstract works.

Richter had first seriously engaged gestural abstract painting as a sustained artistic enquiry in 1976, and thus this work stems from almost fifteen years of his investigation into various technical and aesthetic possibilities in abstraction. Through the 1980s he had bridged conceptual spaces between pure, inexplicable abstraction and the figurative world. He had pursued his project of Photo-Abstract painting, which took literal subjects – brushstrokes, peeling paint, suggestions of landscape (both natural and urban) – and magnified and distorted them so as to appear abstract. However, by the end of the decade the character of Richter's abstract work became increasingly determined by technique and method. Indeed, Richter's working practice for his Abstract Paintings is remarkably methodical: he begins by placing a number of white primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several of them at the same time and reworking them until they are completely harmonized, which has been compared by Peter Sager as being "like a chessplayer simultaneously playing on several boards" (Peter Sager, 'Mit der Farbe denken', Zeitmagazin 49, 28^th November 1986, p. 34). Tracts of colour are dragged across the canvas using a squeegee, so that the various strains of malleable, semi-liquid pigment suspended in oil are fused together and smudged first into the canvas, and then layered on top of each other as the paint strata accumulate. The painting undergoes multiple variations in which each new accretion brings colour and textural juxtapositions until, as Richter himself declares, "there is no more that I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 108).

This inimitable technique depends to a great degree upon chance, which is fundamental to the ideology of Richter's abstraction. As the artist has himself explained, "I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it 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" (the artist interviewed in 1990 in: Hubertus Butin, Stefan Gronert, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Eds, Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 36). With circumstance as a defining trait of its execution, the painterly triumph of Abstraktes Bild becomes independent of the artist. The work's evolving and ever-changing visual character is ultimately the autonomous product of creative coincidence.

Abstraktes Bild attests Richter's theory of abstraction that "there is no order, everything is dissolved, [it is] more revolutionary, anarchistic" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 108). Richter's painting deconstructs perception, representation and visual communication to create a sublime chaos with no fixed identity. Indeed, this work instigates an emotional relationship with the viewer to become an experience rather than an object. In the words of Roald Nasgaard, "The character of the Abstract Paintings is not their resolution but the dispersal of their elements, their coexisting contradictory expressions and moods, their opposition of promises and denials. They are complex visual events, suspended in interrogation, and "fictive models" for that reality which escapes direct address, eludes description and conceptualization, but resides inarticulate in our experience" (Roald Nasgaard in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 110). With Abstraktes Bild Richter's painting completely abandons all referents of the figurative world and opens the viewer to a subjective sensory and phenomenal experience.