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Lot Essay
A cast of radioactive colors, Richter's impenetrable canvas is a kaleidoscopic array of fire reds, radiating greens, and electric blues. Part of a series of 115 original paintings executed in collaboration with Parkett Magazine, drawing on variations of green, red and blue, the lively unmixed colors imbue a brashness and brazenness that in turn produce undeniable passion and sublimity. Before plunging into his famed series of Abstraktes-Bilds in the 1980s, few would have described him as a colorist, however it has become impossible to deny Richter's highly accomplished use of pigment. Robert Storr has enthusiastically attested, "it is hard to think of him as anything other than one of the great colorists of late twentieth-century painting" (R. Storr, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 70).
Applying paint directly from the tube along the border of his canvas, Richter pulls his pigments across the surface of his work with a squeegee. Painstakingly layering blue upon red over a base of radioactive green, the pigments fracture as they are spread thin across each preceding layer. In an instantaneous act of both revealing and concealing, the push and pull of the streaks provide a pictorial demonstration of Richter's belief that what we call 'reality' is ultimately a fiction, a mere model for understanding the world.
Grün-Blau-Rot is a visual spectacle of vibrant, nearly toxic pigments coalesced through Richter's own unique process. Painterly manifestation of the artist's belief in art as mankind's "highest form of hope," his abstracts adhere to no known logic or ideology but are created through a careful cumulative and constructive process during which Richter deliberately avoids all conventional rules of aesthetics in order to arrive at work that belies pictorial ideology. "And if now I think of Mondrian, in which picture can partly be interpreted as models of society, I can also see my abstracts as metaphors in their own right, pictures that are about a possibility of social coexistence. Looked at in this way, all that I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom" (G. Richter and B. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting, London, 1988 p. 33).
Applying paint directly from the tube along the border of his canvas, Richter pulls his pigments across the surface of his work with a squeegee. Painstakingly layering blue upon red over a base of radioactive green, the pigments fracture as they are spread thin across each preceding layer. In an instantaneous act of both revealing and concealing, the push and pull of the streaks provide a pictorial demonstration of Richter's belief that what we call 'reality' is ultimately a fiction, a mere model for understanding the world.
Grün-Blau-Rot is a visual spectacle of vibrant, nearly toxic pigments coalesced through Richter's own unique process. Painterly manifestation of the artist's belief in art as mankind's "highest form of hope," his abstracts adhere to no known logic or ideology but are created through a careful cumulative and constructive process during which Richter deliberately avoids all conventional rules of aesthetics in order to arrive at work that belies pictorial ideology. "And if now I think of Mondrian, in which picture can partly be interpreted as models of society, I can also see my abstracts as metaphors in their own right, pictures that are about a possibility of social coexistence. Looked at in this way, all that I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom" (G. Richter and B. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting, London, 1988 p. 33).