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Lot Essay
Executed in 1974, Grau is one within a critical series of completely monochrome grey paintings that mark a turning point in Richter's art, moving from his photorealist history paintings to the freely improvised coloured abstraction that has since become his hallmark. Richter first employed grisaille painting at the very start of his career, using it to create his hyper real photo-paintings. However, it was not until 1968 that Richter began to experiment with grey for the purposes of abstraction, painting over failed canvases and dissolving the figurative into the monochrome. Having been disappointed with some of his figurative works, he had painted over them in an act of negation that resulted in pictures which echoed his grey-scalecolour charts from 1966. Within a very short time, Richter had perceived the incredible variety and potential that existed within these 'Grey' pictures: their nihilistic origins had been transcended as the original destructive act had resulted in a lush abstract painting. Carried out shortly after his celebrated series of 48 Portraits that was exhibited in the German Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, the conceptual link between the grey depictions of famous men and the monochrome canvases is immediately apparent.
Despite the apparently simple idea behind the grey canvases, there is a great deal of variety between each work in the series and a complex conceptual background. In Grau the surface of the work has a lustrous graphite tone, with traces of the artist's gestural brushwork evident across the richly textured surface of the painting. As D. Elger has observed, 'it is precisely in this stripping away of artistry that the painterly qualities achieve a lasting effect'. (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 209.) This was the intention of the use of grey paint, which for Richter 'evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour". (H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter; The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83.) Richter's capacity to do so much using one colour reveals his power as an artist and his continued ability to salvage and indeed celebrate painting in the age of conceptualism and abstraction, managing to deconstruct and then reconstruct the entire nature of picture-making, all by embracing the deliberately inscrutable grey.
Despite the apparently simple idea behind the grey canvases, there is a great deal of variety between each work in the series and a complex conceptual background. In Grau the surface of the work has a lustrous graphite tone, with traces of the artist's gestural brushwork evident across the richly textured surface of the painting. As D. Elger has observed, 'it is precisely in this stripping away of artistry that the painterly qualities achieve a lasting effect'. (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 209.) This was the intention of the use of grey paint, which for Richter 'evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour". (H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter; The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83.) Richter's capacity to do so much using one colour reveals his power as an artist and his continued ability to salvage and indeed celebrate painting in the age of conceptualism and abstraction, managing to deconstruct and then reconstruct the entire nature of picture-making, all by embracing the deliberately inscrutable grey.