Gerhard Richter

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1992

Kassel, Documenta IX, 1992
Paris, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Bonn, Kunst-und Ausstellunsgshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Gerhard Richter, 1993-4, p. 165, illustrated in colour

Angelika Thill et. al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, no. 762-4, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1993, no. 762-4,  n.p., illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, Gehard Richter: Documenta IX, 1992; Marian Goodman Gallery, 1993, no. 12, p. 35, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly warmer, with brighter and richer red and yellow tones. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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An astoundingly vivid and chromatic display, Abstraktes Bild records Gerhard Richter’s intense scrutiny of the grid, a theme that he triumphantly explored throughout 1992, having first confronted the matrix via his colour chart grids begun in 1966. Broadcasting spectacular waves and imbricated structural stripes of verdant green and ochre yellow punctuated by passages of cadmium red and deep topaz, Abstraktes Bild offers a dramatic schema of painterly relations. A highly distinguished example of Richter’s painting from this period, the present work possesses an unimpeachable exhibition history, having been included within Richter’s seminal installation at Documenta IX in 1992, and included in the major 1993-4 travelling exhibition Gerhard Richter, which toured major public museums in Paris, Bonn, Stockholm, and Madrid. Offering the unparalleled complexity and luminosity that characterises Richter’s paintings of 1992, Abstraktes Bildis a stunning testimony to Richter’s dominance of contemporary painterly practice.

In 1992 Richter selected Abstraktes Bild as one of thirteen works (one comprising four canvases) for display within his installation at Documenta IX in Kassel. Co-designed with architect Paul Robbrecht, who had also created the pavilion housing Richter’s space, Benjamin Buchloh writes that the Africa walnut wood-panelled gallery “suspended itself between the long-lost intimacy of the collector’s cabinet and the boardrooms of contemporary corporate culture” (Benjamin Buchloh, ‘The Allegories of Painting’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1993, p.9). Its furnitureless and sunlit interior was adorned solely by the works: eleven abstract canvases from 1991 and 1992, a small floral still-life painting, and Grey Mirror (1992), a pair of large-scale mirror panels. Collectively, this gathering constituted an unprecedentedly immersive project for Richter, recalling the artist’s earlier “dream,” in his own words: “that the pictures will become an environment or become architecture – that would be even more effective” (the artist quoted in: Dorothea Dietrich, ‘Interview with Gerhard Richter’, The Print Collector's Newsletter, vol. 16, no. 4, 1985, p. 130). Within this display, the present work hung near the ceiling as the centrepiece between its sister paintings Abstraktes Bild (762-2) and Abstraktes Bild (762-3). Continuing his analysis of the installation, Buchloh remarked that “[i]f the large panel paintings were distinguished by their almost monochromatic extinction of color, then the smaller grid paintings signalled in an absolutely random fashion pure luminosity” (Benjamin Buchloh, Op.cit., p.11).

Curated alongside a number of muted and grey canvases, Abstraktes Bild and its brethren shone like beacons of piercing polychrome light. Its vertical columns evoking dense forest, and its wavering central line mimicking a horizon, the canvas equally evokes the beauty of natural scenery. Robert Storr believes that “amid the paintings’ scraped and layered pigments” there emerge “shoals, riptides and cresting waves” which propel the viewer’s interpretation beyond mere abstraction (Robert Storr quoted in: Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. XIII). Yet assigning Abstraktes Bild any representational meaning would be mistaken, for Richter denies art history’s traditional interpretive models even as he produces some of the most aesthetically stunning paintings of his generation. Even as its dense and rhythmic array of forms alludes to a thickly forested landscape, sun-dappled and dotted by glimpses of sky and pools of water, its composition is fundamentally the product of chance. This tension arising from mutually negating pictorial elements - chance and order, subjective expression and objective replication - guides Richter’s practice. It advances his career-defining effort to undermine false artistic mythologies: “all that I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom. No paradises” (the artist in 1986 quoted in: Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Eds., Gerhard Richter: Text, Cologne 2009, p. 187).

The agent of Richter’s profound methodological dialogue with chance is the squeegee, which facilitates the partly random excavation and accumulation of paint layers. Aligned with the phenomena of nature by chaos, the resulting surface embodies an intricacy of striation found in biological and geological formations, and imbues the present work with an almost organic, self-generating quality. An additional vivacity and energy may also have been impressed upon the composition by Richter’s psychic state during the time of its creation. Dietmar Elger has remarked on the uniquely vigorous construction of the Abstraktes Bilder from 1992, which significantly coincided with a period of personal turbulence for the artist. He writes that an earlier “playful lightness in the application of paint and the transparency of the colours gives way to a more compact formal structure… the total impression is disrupted and contradictory; individual elements collide. The paint application has a heavy force, and the intense colouration is disrupted by dark intermediate tones” (Dietmar Elger, Op. cit., p. 268). For Elgar the gouging linear sweeps and aggressive criss-cross oscillations of Abstraktes Bild are reflective of the emotional turmoil that Richter experienced during the final separation from his partner and fellow artist Iza Genzken, whereas the jubilant palette and softer textures of earlier years in the 1980s correspond to a period of great happiness in their relationship.

Comprising dynamic layers of dramatically deployed paint, the present work incites an extraordinary and rare balance of aggressive facture and lyrical chromatic transitions. Encapsulating Richter’s very highest achievement, the abstract paintings surmount an artistic inquiry spanning over fifty years, in which Richter has deconstructed, recapitulated and revitalised the medium of paint. Standing at the apotheosis of a breath-taking body of abstract work, Abstraktes Bild exhibits a superlative philosophical and visual equilibrium between the natural and the mechanical, erasure and construction, veiling and revealing to impart a boundless and spectacular aesthetic encounter.