Gerhard Richter

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Connecticut
Karl Hutter Fine Art, Los Angeles

Dietmar Elger, Ed., Gerhard Richter, Catalogue Raisonne 1962-1993, Vol. III, Bonn 1993, p. 195,  no. 773-4, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Over the course of 1992, Gerhard Richter introduced a new formal element to his highly distinctive and visually powerful Abstrakte Bilder. Whereas the earlier manifestations of his chromatically complex abstract paintings often had no definable structure - largely due to the chance-based methods that Richter employs to create them - the introduction of the grid marks an important shift in Richter’s practice.

This series of paintings, made in preparation for Documenta IX in Kassel, coincided with a period of personal turbulence after the artist's separation from his wife Isa Genzken. Richter’s interest in the grid, which is exceptionally well-defined in the present work, could therefore be seen as a reaction to the sense of chaos that the artist expressed in his personal notes of the same year. Like Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, which Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses in an interview about this series, Richter’s abstract paintings of this period function as models that allow him to gain control over his reality. Confirming this interpretation, the artist stated: “this is something that came up in an interview with Buchloh: the idea that Mondrian’s paintings might be understood as social models of a non-hierarchical, egalitarian world. Perhaps that was what prompted me to see my own abstract pictures as models, not of an egalitarian world but of a varied and constantly changing one” (the artist in 1993 quoted in: Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Eds., Gerhard Richter: Text, Cologne 2009, p. 300).

The sumptuous horizontal and vertical lines of the present Abstraktes Bild are, as Richter astutely remarked, not the rigid abstraction of Mondrian, but the more varied and changing approach of his complex and multi-faceted practice. Despite the fact that the grid brings structure to the painting, it simultaneously obscures what lies behind its layered surface, which is only sparsely revealed through the density of oscillating horizontals and verticals that recede into the background. Even though Richter has here allowed himself to regain control over his work through a formal device, the magnificent chance qualities of his previous explorations are still present: combustions of colour and the lush surface of his signature squeegee are abundant. This fortuitousness is deeply embedded in the structure of the painting, as the lines of the grid were created through the removal of layers of paint with the squeegee, revealing a rich texture that the artist could not have anticipated. This makes the present work a superb example of Richter’s highly original exploration of the grid, through the sophisticated interplay of intentionality and chance that makes his ongoing investigation into the nature of painting one of the most influential practices of our time.