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Lot Essay
'We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket and so on. When we don't find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested' (G. Richter interview with R. Storr, R. Storr (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 304).
Created in 1983, Sumpf (Marsh) is an early and vibrant example of Gerhard Richter's investigations into painterly abstraction. Glowing with brilliant colours of electric blue, chlorophyll green and pillar box red, the painting reflects the euphoric atmosphere of the artist's early years with his wife Isa Genzken. It is a confident palette strikingly different from those employed under Fauvism or Expressionism and closer to the masters of the German Renaissance. As critic Stephen Edlis has suggested, Richter's paintings from this period recall the 'luminous, acid colour of Dürer, Altdorfer and Grünewald' (S. Edlis quoted in R. Storr (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 71). Rendered over the top of the vivid but smooth paint surface are energetic brushstrokes in a palette of nude pinks, burgundy reds, canary yellow and white, assembled together to form a polychromatic wedge at the centre of the composition. The viewer's attention gravitates towards this frenzied array of brush marks, eager to catch a glimpse of any hidden figurative elements lying beneath.
Although fundamentally illegible, it is perhaps possible to interpret the dark bisecting line running vertically through the centre of the canvas as some landscape horizon, rotated by ninety degrees. Above it, in the cobalt blue are white vaporous gestures, suggestive of clouds hovering a short distance overhead. Richter was certainly not denying such visual allusions as he continued to title some of his works after natural landscape features. Nevertheless, the slow effacement of illusionistic under-painting was clearly underway in Richter's oeuvre, as is evident in the progressively abstruse compositions of Wolken (Clouds) (1982), Marian (1983) and Busch (Bush) (1985). As the artist has explained his rationale: 'we only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket and so on. When we don't find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested' (G. Richter interview with R. Storr (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 304).
In Sumpf Richter also seeks to emphasize the continuities that exist between representational painting and abstraction. A careful reading of the artist's majestic landscape paintings helps to elaborate this unique thesis. In his cloud series from the early 1970s for example, close physical proximity to the surface of the painting submits the picture to a process of disintegration before the eyes. Instead of a figurative landscape, the work becomes like a blown-up element of a photograph or an abstract painterly composition of colored elements. As Dietmar Elger has highlighted, 'in this sense all Gerhard Richter's landscapes are visual models of a lost truth and this complements his Abstract Paintings, which he himself has described as 'fictive models' for the 'nonvisual' (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter Landscapes, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1998, p. 21).
Created in 1983, Sumpf (Marsh) is an early and vibrant example of Gerhard Richter's investigations into painterly abstraction. Glowing with brilliant colours of electric blue, chlorophyll green and pillar box red, the painting reflects the euphoric atmosphere of the artist's early years with his wife Isa Genzken. It is a confident palette strikingly different from those employed under Fauvism or Expressionism and closer to the masters of the German Renaissance. As critic Stephen Edlis has suggested, Richter's paintings from this period recall the 'luminous, acid colour of Dürer, Altdorfer and Grünewald' (S. Edlis quoted in R. Storr (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 71). Rendered over the top of the vivid but smooth paint surface are energetic brushstrokes in a palette of nude pinks, burgundy reds, canary yellow and white, assembled together to form a polychromatic wedge at the centre of the composition. The viewer's attention gravitates towards this frenzied array of brush marks, eager to catch a glimpse of any hidden figurative elements lying beneath.
Although fundamentally illegible, it is perhaps possible to interpret the dark bisecting line running vertically through the centre of the canvas as some landscape horizon, rotated by ninety degrees. Above it, in the cobalt blue are white vaporous gestures, suggestive of clouds hovering a short distance overhead. Richter was certainly not denying such visual allusions as he continued to title some of his works after natural landscape features. Nevertheless, the slow effacement of illusionistic under-painting was clearly underway in Richter's oeuvre, as is evident in the progressively abstruse compositions of Wolken (Clouds) (1982), Marian (1983) and Busch (Bush) (1985). As the artist has explained his rationale: 'we only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket and so on. When we don't find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested' (G. Richter interview with R. Storr (ed.), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 304).
In Sumpf Richter also seeks to emphasize the continuities that exist between representational painting and abstraction. A careful reading of the artist's majestic landscape paintings helps to elaborate this unique thesis. In his cloud series from the early 1970s for example, close physical proximity to the surface of the painting submits the picture to a process of disintegration before the eyes. Instead of a figurative landscape, the work becomes like a blown-up element of a photograph or an abstract painterly composition of colored elements. As Dietmar Elger has highlighted, 'in this sense all Gerhard Richter's landscapes are visual models of a lost truth and this complements his Abstract Paintings, which he himself has described as 'fictive models' for the 'nonvisual' (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter Landscapes, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1998, p. 21).