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Lot Essay
'For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process, I dont actually reveal what was beneath. If I wanted to do that, I would have to think what to reveal (figurative pictures or signs or patterns); that is, pictures that might as well be produced direct. It would be something of a symbolic trick: bringing to light the lost, buried pictures, or something to that effect. The process of applying, destroying and layering serves only to achieve a more varied technical repertoire in picture-making' (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 322).
'I dont have a specific picture in my mind's eye... 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 pre-determined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of Nature (or a Readymade) always possesses' (G. Richter, 'Interview with Sabine Schütz', 1990, D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 312).
Abstraktes Bild is a monumental and spectacularly realised painting from the height of Gerhard Richter's abstract practice. Created in 1992, it has a rich exhibition history, being originally conceived for the landmark Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, and later being installed in Richter's definitive and highly acclaimed travelling retrospective Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting held first at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2002. The painting offers a beautiful combination of marine blue and anthracite resulting from the myriad layers of paint squeegeed across its surface. Into these horizontal layers, Richter cuts vertical striations using the hard edge of a palette knife. Rills of paint run up like tides alongside each band of blue, interspersed by broad apertures revealing earlier paint surfaces. Colours of burnished red and saffron yellow rise up from beneath like cross-sections through a fossil, offering the viewer visually engaging glimpses of the artist's working practice. Cool and hypnotic Abstraktes Bild's improvised composition recalls the finely shot silk depicted by 17th century Delft School painter, Johannes Vermeer.
If we think of Richter's abstracts from the late 1970s to the present as occupying two central phases: the full-on grand abstractions that he develops from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, and the later, more brooding, more somber, more monochromatic 'mature' paintings of the last two decades, this painting singlehandedly marks the crossroads, in that the opulently interwoven ground layers contain a text book display of the artists full-on bravura in abstraction, in his ongoing investigation into painting, that he has then sanded down and overlayed on top with the more subdued, more somber grayish light filled surfaces more rooted in the keen observation of nature that have become his greater preoccupation in his recent paintings. So in this work, a standalone painting not of a series, but a series of one (757), more than any other painting of Richter's oeuvre, marks that precise moment in which the battle between the art of his artistic maturity and of his earthly maturity, between painting as an act and as a record of the observation of nature and the visual effects of the world around him, are set in paint.
Documenta IX was an important milestone for Richter. Inviting the architect Paul Robbrecht to assist in designing his space, Richter transformed the aluminium mobile pavilion offered by the organizers in Kassel into an intimate and luxuriously wood paneled room. In doing so, Richter was revisiting his own interest in the architectural spaces and arrangements of rooms that had begun with his formative years in Dresden as a mural painter. He was also entering a dialogue with modernist exhibition practice, eschewing the isolated, neutral white cube in favour of a more historically derived setting. Richter assembled fourteen works including Abstraktes Bild, the largest of the group, into two rows lending the installation, 'an air of permanency and intimacy [that] unified the work and the space' (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 322). Amongst the large abstract works was also an exquisitely photo-realist flower painting and the double paneled grey painting, Mirror. The success of the installation was such that Richter decided to replicate its appearance in the layout of his studio.
'I dont have a specific picture in my mind's eye... 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 pre-determined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of Nature (or a Readymade) always possesses' (G. Richter, 'Interview with Sabine Schütz', 1990, D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 312).
Abstraktes Bild is a monumental and spectacularly realised painting from the height of Gerhard Richter's abstract practice. Created in 1992, it has a rich exhibition history, being originally conceived for the landmark Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992, and later being installed in Richter's definitive and highly acclaimed travelling retrospective Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting held first at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2002. The painting offers a beautiful combination of marine blue and anthracite resulting from the myriad layers of paint squeegeed across its surface. Into these horizontal layers, Richter cuts vertical striations using the hard edge of a palette knife. Rills of paint run up like tides alongside each band of blue, interspersed by broad apertures revealing earlier paint surfaces. Colours of burnished red and saffron yellow rise up from beneath like cross-sections through a fossil, offering the viewer visually engaging glimpses of the artist's working practice. Cool and hypnotic Abstraktes Bild's improvised composition recalls the finely shot silk depicted by 17th century Delft School painter, Johannes Vermeer.
If we think of Richter's abstracts from the late 1970s to the present as occupying two central phases: the full-on grand abstractions that he develops from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, and the later, more brooding, more somber, more monochromatic 'mature' paintings of the last two decades, this painting singlehandedly marks the crossroads, in that the opulently interwoven ground layers contain a text book display of the artists full-on bravura in abstraction, in his ongoing investigation into painting, that he has then sanded down and overlayed on top with the more subdued, more somber grayish light filled surfaces more rooted in the keen observation of nature that have become his greater preoccupation in his recent paintings. So in this work, a standalone painting not of a series, but a series of one (757), more than any other painting of Richter's oeuvre, marks that precise moment in which the battle between the art of his artistic maturity and of his earthly maturity, between painting as an act and as a record of the observation of nature and the visual effects of the world around him, are set in paint.
Documenta IX was an important milestone for Richter. Inviting the architect Paul Robbrecht to assist in designing his space, Richter transformed the aluminium mobile pavilion offered by the organizers in Kassel into an intimate and luxuriously wood paneled room. In doing so, Richter was revisiting his own interest in the architectural spaces and arrangements of rooms that had begun with his formative years in Dresden as a mural painter. He was also entering a dialogue with modernist exhibition practice, eschewing the isolated, neutral white cube in favour of a more historically derived setting. Richter assembled fourteen works including Abstraktes Bild, the largest of the group, into two rows lending the installation, 'an air of permanency and intimacy [that] unified the work and the space' (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 322). Amongst the large abstract works was also an exquisitely photo-realist flower painting and the double paneled grey painting, Mirror. The success of the installation was such that Richter decided to replicate its appearance in the layout of his studio.