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Lot Essay
This lot will be included in the forthcoming fourth volume of the official catalogue raisonné of the artist, edited by the Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
"In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualisable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy all the resources of art, in fact in order to depict 'nothing'. Accustomed to pictures in which we recognize something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere color (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualisable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events more accessible... So, in dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, extremer, more visual and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture. 'Art is the highest form of hope'"
(Gerhard Richter quoted in H.-U. Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, trans. D. Britt, London 1995, p. 100)
"In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualisable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy all the resources of art, in fact in order to depict 'nothing'. Accustomed to pictures in which we recognize something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere color (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualisable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events more accessible... So, in dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, extremer, more visual and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture. 'Art is the highest form of hope'"
(Gerhard Richter quoted in H.-U. Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, trans. D. Britt, London 1995, p. 100)