At once dramatic and atmospheric, Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) is an exquisite canvas from Gerhard Richter’s celebrated Wolken series, a corpus of work that powerfully navigates the boundary between painting and photography, abstraction and representation, nature and the sublime. Marked by the weight of the post-war period, this painting stands among the most beautiful of Richter’s oeuvre while representing the most transgressive, symbolically redolent motifs ever translated by the artist into paint. This work will be offered in Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction on 29 June 2022.