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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, edited by the Gerhard Richter Archiv Staatliche Kunstsammlunger Dresden.
The iridescent mesh of colours that define Gerhard Richter's Heu mark it out as one of the most lyrical contributions to his ambitious abstract paintings project. This two metre tall canvas is one of only five similarly proportioned abstract works to be completed in 1995. It is amongst the largest formats to be used during this period and its human scale makes for a deeply engaging visual experience. For this series of works Gerhard Richter named all of the paintings after agricultural plants to recall the natural associations inherent in the physical presence of the painting. Richter's abstract pictures are frequently noted for their strident, almost acidic use of colour, but in this canvas he has created a luminous surface from diaphanous veils of pigmentation. The paint is pulled down the canvas in a broken axis of vertical striations and horizontal smears, under which it is possible to observe additional layers of colour below.
Opposing moods are elicited in the hazy, scumbled hues and the bold passages of bright white that threaten to dissolve and break apart. These seemingly blank areas dominate the painting, immediately instilling a sense of expansive space. The ethereal, self-cancelling quality of white has proved a useful tool to reductivist painters since the turn of the twentieth century and Richter has recently pushed the boundaries of white abstraction in a series of near monochrome paintings exhibited in New York in 2009. Yet it was in paintings like Heu that the achromatic pigment took a leading role in perfecting his method of constructing a picture through palimpsestic actions and erasures. White's inherent ability to reflect, rather than absorb light lend this canvas a shimmering quality, whilst its augmentations of blues and greens bestow a ravishing beauty that is redolent of Claude Monet's Nymphéas. Heu is not intended as an abstraction from something, however, as it has no basis of referents in the observable world. It instead performs as an incredibly active zone of potential that forces the viewer to consider how pictures are seen and read, and also how they are made.
The iridescent mesh of colours that define Gerhard Richter's Heu mark it out as one of the most lyrical contributions to his ambitious abstract paintings project. This two metre tall canvas is one of only five similarly proportioned abstract works to be completed in 1995. It is amongst the largest formats to be used during this period and its human scale makes for a deeply engaging visual experience. For this series of works Gerhard Richter named all of the paintings after agricultural plants to recall the natural associations inherent in the physical presence of the painting. Richter's abstract pictures are frequently noted for their strident, almost acidic use of colour, but in this canvas he has created a luminous surface from diaphanous veils of pigmentation. The paint is pulled down the canvas in a broken axis of vertical striations and horizontal smears, under which it is possible to observe additional layers of colour below.
Opposing moods are elicited in the hazy, scumbled hues and the bold passages of bright white that threaten to dissolve and break apart. These seemingly blank areas dominate the painting, immediately instilling a sense of expansive space. The ethereal, self-cancelling quality of white has proved a useful tool to reductivist painters since the turn of the twentieth century and Richter has recently pushed the boundaries of white abstraction in a series of near monochrome paintings exhibited in New York in 2009. Yet it was in paintings like Heu that the achromatic pigment took a leading role in perfecting his method of constructing a picture through palimpsestic actions and erasures. White's inherent ability to reflect, rather than absorb light lend this canvas a shimmering quality, whilst its augmentations of blues and greens bestow a ravishing beauty that is redolent of Claude Monet's Nymphéas. Heu is not intended as an abstraction from something, however, as it has no basis of referents in the observable world. It instead performs as an incredibly active zone of potential that forces the viewer to consider how pictures are seen and read, and also how they are made.