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Lot Essay
'Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which we may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images live heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood' (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, 'Gerhard Richter', Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1988, p. 107).
Rendered in a luxuriant, regal palette of emerald green and azure blue, Abstraktes Bild is a majestic painting from the finest period of Gerhard Richter's abstraction. Created in 1994 it was exhibited the following year in Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties at Anthony d'Offay Gallery; an acclaimed show including works that now reside in major museum collections such as Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Tate Modern, London, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Abstraktes Bild is a monumental work that enchants the viewer with its verdant colour. Palimpsests of mauve and red radiate through the beautifully worked surface in a celebration of Richter's improvised and spontaneous technique. Here this practice has been perfected, the surface bearing no signs of struggle or conflict, but rather the free flowing, intuitive gestures of the squeegee over canvas. In Abstraktes Bild, Richter has become captivated by the rhythmic application of paint in vertical planes, the lustrous medium swept from a vertiginous height to the very base of the painting in successive strokes. There is a clear sense of movement and momentum in the painting, the squeegee traversing from left to right, partially obscuring and at the same time interacting with the drenched blue at the centre of the composition. Vast antecedent layers laid down in horizontal swathes are revealed and submerged in the artist's subsequent painting. This intersection of horizontal and vertical and the intermarriage of wet-on-wet oil paint invoke a sense of the sublime; the viewer's spirit elevated through the intense visual pleasure of navigating the heroic painting's elegant contours.
Abstraktes Bild offers a profound emotive and atmospheric quality. Whilst Richter avoids the gestural, expressive intent of the generation of Informel and Abstract Expressionist painters, his work still betrays a sense of his emotional life. Avoiding any personal expression that appears too direct, he nevertheless imbues his canvases with traces of feeling. In 1994, whilst he was completing Abstraktes Bild, Richter was also engaged in a series of paintings depicting his new wife Sabine Moritz. In particular the photorealist masterpiece, Lesende demonstrates a beautiful tenderness towards its subject, light illuminating Sabine's elegant profile. This was a time of supreme contentment for the artist; in 1991 he had held his breakthrough exhibition at Tate Gallery, London and in 1993 he received a major touring retrospective Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993 curated by Kasper König. The near sublime beauty and balance of Abstraktes Bild can be understood as a reflection of this personal satisfaction. Indeed a sense of his enriched emotional life is evident in the confident gestures, radiance and majestic palette of Abstraktes Bild. As Dietmar Elger suggests, in this period' Richter attempted to take possession of his domestic happiness through a long and painterly process, as if only this would make the situation believable' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 327).
For Richter, his free abstraction is the product of a long investigation into the possibilities of painting spanning more than five decades. Coming full-circle from his early Tisch (1962) in which he cancelled his photorealist image with haptic swirls of grey paint, Richter began in the 1980s to freely overlay his canvases with colourful streaks and drags of pigment using his signature squeegee. As Dietmar Elger has observed, 'for Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).
This method was to find its purest articulation between 1989 and 1994 with large-format paintings such as Abstraktes Bild. Deconstructing the relationship between figure and ground, Richter was embracing the contingency of his medium, enjoying the effects of the spontaneous yet confident application of paint. As he once explained, 'it is a good technique for switching off thinking consciously, I can't calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice 'between' state' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).
In Abstraktes Bild Richter creates a work that celebrates the sensual pleasures of freely applied paint and colour, just as he accomplished in 1993 with his cycle of four Grün-Blau abstracts currently held in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In addition to the rich optical experience of the painting, Richter encourages the viewer to immerse him or herself in the imaginary space of the composition. He insists that 'paintings are always illusionistic' so that a line, form or colour 'is only interesting when it releases an interesting association' (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, 'Gerhard Richter', Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). In Abstraktes Bild the cumulative layers of non-representational paint in hues of green and blue, cannot help but evoke the lush green parkland or European pine forest drenched in rain or morning dew. Just as Claude Monet had done generations before him in his Nymphéas, Richter beautifully illuminates the shifting boundary between figuration and abstraction. Whilst Monet's immersive, shimmering images of waterlilies and reflections on the quicksilver water of the pond at Giverny pushed figuration to the brink of abstraction, emphasising the illusory aspect of the lush, textured paint itself, in Abstraktes Bild Richter has arrived at the same effect through different means.
In his most definitive elucidation of his abstract method published in the Documenta 7 exhibition catalogue in 1979, Richter explained that for him, the abstract painting is no less a representation of reality than those photorealist figurative paintings of landscapes, people or places. Rather it represents the other end of the same spectrum, depicting the unseen, unspoken, intangible reality. As he elaborated, 'every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model; without models we would know nothing about reality and would be like animals. Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images live heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood' (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, 'Gerhard Richter', Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107).
'For Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).
Rendered in a luxuriant, regal palette of emerald green and azure blue, Abstraktes Bild is a majestic painting from the finest period of Gerhard Richter's abstraction. Created in 1994 it was exhibited the following year in Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties at Anthony d'Offay Gallery; an acclaimed show including works that now reside in major museum collections such as Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Tate Modern, London, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Abstraktes Bild is a monumental work that enchants the viewer with its verdant colour. Palimpsests of mauve and red radiate through the beautifully worked surface in a celebration of Richter's improvised and spontaneous technique. Here this practice has been perfected, the surface bearing no signs of struggle or conflict, but rather the free flowing, intuitive gestures of the squeegee over canvas. In Abstraktes Bild, Richter has become captivated by the rhythmic application of paint in vertical planes, the lustrous medium swept from a vertiginous height to the very base of the painting in successive strokes. There is a clear sense of movement and momentum in the painting, the squeegee traversing from left to right, partially obscuring and at the same time interacting with the drenched blue at the centre of the composition. Vast antecedent layers laid down in horizontal swathes are revealed and submerged in the artist's subsequent painting. This intersection of horizontal and vertical and the intermarriage of wet-on-wet oil paint invoke a sense of the sublime; the viewer's spirit elevated through the intense visual pleasure of navigating the heroic painting's elegant contours.
Abstraktes Bild offers a profound emotive and atmospheric quality. Whilst Richter avoids the gestural, expressive intent of the generation of Informel and Abstract Expressionist painters, his work still betrays a sense of his emotional life. Avoiding any personal expression that appears too direct, he nevertheless imbues his canvases with traces of feeling. In 1994, whilst he was completing Abstraktes Bild, Richter was also engaged in a series of paintings depicting his new wife Sabine Moritz. In particular the photorealist masterpiece, Lesende demonstrates a beautiful tenderness towards its subject, light illuminating Sabine's elegant profile. This was a time of supreme contentment for the artist; in 1991 he had held his breakthrough exhibition at Tate Gallery, London and in 1993 he received a major touring retrospective Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993 curated by Kasper König. The near sublime beauty and balance of Abstraktes Bild can be understood as a reflection of this personal satisfaction. Indeed a sense of his enriched emotional life is evident in the confident gestures, radiance and majestic palette of Abstraktes Bild. As Dietmar Elger suggests, in this period' Richter attempted to take possession of his domestic happiness through a long and painterly process, as if only this would make the situation believable' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 327).
For Richter, his free abstraction is the product of a long investigation into the possibilities of painting spanning more than five decades. Coming full-circle from his early Tisch (1962) in which he cancelled his photorealist image with haptic swirls of grey paint, Richter began in the 1980s to freely overlay his canvases with colourful streaks and drags of pigment using his signature squeegee. As Dietmar Elger has observed, 'for Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).
This method was to find its purest articulation between 1989 and 1994 with large-format paintings such as Abstraktes Bild. Deconstructing the relationship between figure and ground, Richter was embracing the contingency of his medium, enjoying the effects of the spontaneous yet confident application of paint. As he once explained, 'it is a good technique for switching off thinking consciously, I can't calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice 'between' state' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).
In Abstraktes Bild Richter creates a work that celebrates the sensual pleasures of freely applied paint and colour, just as he accomplished in 1993 with his cycle of four Grün-Blau abstracts currently held in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In addition to the rich optical experience of the painting, Richter encourages the viewer to immerse him or herself in the imaginary space of the composition. He insists that 'paintings are always illusionistic' so that a line, form or colour 'is only interesting when it releases an interesting association' (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, 'Gerhard Richter', Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). In Abstraktes Bild the cumulative layers of non-representational paint in hues of green and blue, cannot help but evoke the lush green parkland or European pine forest drenched in rain or morning dew. Just as Claude Monet had done generations before him in his Nymphéas, Richter beautifully illuminates the shifting boundary between figuration and abstraction. Whilst Monet's immersive, shimmering images of waterlilies and reflections on the quicksilver water of the pond at Giverny pushed figuration to the brink of abstraction, emphasising the illusory aspect of the lush, textured paint itself, in Abstraktes Bild Richter has arrived at the same effect through different means.
In his most definitive elucidation of his abstract method published in the Documenta 7 exhibition catalogue in 1979, Richter explained that for him, the abstract painting is no less a representation of reality than those photorealist figurative paintings of landscapes, people or places. Rather it represents the other end of the same spectrum, depicting the unseen, unspoken, intangible reality. As he elaborated, 'every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model; without models we would know nothing about reality and would be like animals. Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images live heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood' (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, 'Gerhard Richter', Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107).
'For Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 251).