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Lot Essay
'Perhaps because I'm a bit uncertain, a bit volatile...I'd always been fascinated by abstraction. It's so mysterious, like an unknown land' (G. Richter, interview with N. Serota, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London 2011, p. 20).
Subtle and elegant with it's crystal-like surface, palimpsests of cadmium yellow, emerald green and royal blue peering through, Abstraktes Bild by Gerhard Richter, executed in 2005, is a painting of quiet and understated beauty. From the smoky tones of grisaille sumptuously covering the canvas, luscious apertures of vivid colour emerge, a haunting, celestial white dominating the right side of the painting. Below it a glimpse of azure blue glistens through the layers of paint, drawing the eye towards the symphony of rich texture and colour along the lower edge, enticing the viewer just enough, before retreating back into a translucent mist of the artist's esteemed colour, grey.
Exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in 2005, Abstraktes Bild is intimately connected with the paintings Richter was creating at the time, concentrating his efforts on a single theme for his solo exhibition in New York. This painting was displayed alongside four Silicate paintings, canvasses of repeated, industrial patterns, but more notably, it was positioned in dialogue with Richter's large twelve-part series of abstract paintings that he would later rename Wald (Forest) on the occasion of the 2006 exhibition From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In each of these Wald abstracts now housed in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Richter makes vertical linear impressions with the squeegee, recalling the shape of a tree trunk. Understood in this context, the apparent verticality and gentle lines of Abstraktes Bild are afforded new meaning, imbued with sentimentality, a graceful if unintended Romanticism permeating its form.
Appearing like a deconstructed Teutonic landscape, Abstraktes Bild is suggestive of Richter's own temperament and disposition as a painter. As Richter admitted when asked why he began to make abstract paintings: 'perhaps because I'm a bit uncertain, a bit volatileI'd always been fascinated by abstraction. It's so mysterious, like an unknown land' (G. Richter, interview with N. Serota, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London 2011, p. 20). In this painting, the smooth, automated gesture of moving a squeegee is periodically interrupted, revealing stops and starts in its composition. As if discovering his own canvas for the first time, a gradual process of exploration, Richter creates a harmonious progression of colour and movement.
At the heart of his Abstraktes Bild paintings is Richter's intense examination of the fundamental nature of painting itself. Richter becomes the means through which an almost autonomous, painterly vision comes into being: 'the Abstract Pictures more and more clearly [are] a method of not having and planning the 'motif' but evolving it, letting it come' (G. Richter quoted in H. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 120).
Subtle and elegant with it's crystal-like surface, palimpsests of cadmium yellow, emerald green and royal blue peering through, Abstraktes Bild by Gerhard Richter, executed in 2005, is a painting of quiet and understated beauty. From the smoky tones of grisaille sumptuously covering the canvas, luscious apertures of vivid colour emerge, a haunting, celestial white dominating the right side of the painting. Below it a glimpse of azure blue glistens through the layers of paint, drawing the eye towards the symphony of rich texture and colour along the lower edge, enticing the viewer just enough, before retreating back into a translucent mist of the artist's esteemed colour, grey.
Exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in 2005, Abstraktes Bild is intimately connected with the paintings Richter was creating at the time, concentrating his efforts on a single theme for his solo exhibition in New York. This painting was displayed alongside four Silicate paintings, canvasses of repeated, industrial patterns, but more notably, it was positioned in dialogue with Richter's large twelve-part series of abstract paintings that he would later rename Wald (Forest) on the occasion of the 2006 exhibition From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In each of these Wald abstracts now housed in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Richter makes vertical linear impressions with the squeegee, recalling the shape of a tree trunk. Understood in this context, the apparent verticality and gentle lines of Abstraktes Bild are afforded new meaning, imbued with sentimentality, a graceful if unintended Romanticism permeating its form.
Appearing like a deconstructed Teutonic landscape, Abstraktes Bild is suggestive of Richter's own temperament and disposition as a painter. As Richter admitted when asked why he began to make abstract paintings: 'perhaps because I'm a bit uncertain, a bit volatileI'd always been fascinated by abstraction. It's so mysterious, like an unknown land' (G. Richter, interview with N. Serota, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London 2011, p. 20). In this painting, the smooth, automated gesture of moving a squeegee is periodically interrupted, revealing stops and starts in its composition. As if discovering his own canvas for the first time, a gradual process of exploration, Richter creates a harmonious progression of colour and movement.
At the heart of his Abstraktes Bild paintings is Richter's intense examination of the fundamental nature of painting itself. Richter becomes the means through which an almost autonomous, painterly vision comes into being: 'the Abstract Pictures more and more clearly [are] a method of not having and planning the 'motif' but evolving it, letting it come' (G. Richter quoted in H. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 120).