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Lot Essay
This lot will be included in the forthcoming volume 2 of the "Gerhard Richter. Catalogue Raisonné", edited by the Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden, under cat. no. 360-4.
'Richter's 'Grey' paintings are works that stand on the edge of painting and at the end of the Modernist tradition. Non-conceptual works, they are nevertheless serious in that they are what Richter describes as a "highly scrupulous and cautious attempt to achieve correctness, or rather definitiveness, in painting" and ensure that painting, or at least his painting "pursues a quality which tends towards the valid and the universal." This aim and activity, Richter asserts, "seems to me important, in the face of a mindless, proliferating productivity that becomes less and less definitive'
(H.-U. Obrist ed., Gerhard Richter; The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83).
'Richter's 'Grey' paintings are works that stand on the edge of painting and at the end of the Modernist tradition. Non-conceptual works, they are nevertheless serious in that they are what Richter describes as a "highly scrupulous and cautious attempt to achieve correctness, or rather definitiveness, in painting" and ensure that painting, or at least his painting "pursues a quality which tends towards the valid and the universal." This aim and activity, Richter asserts, "seems to me important, in the face of a mindless, proliferating productivity that becomes less and less definitive'
(H.-U. Obrist ed., Gerhard Richter; The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83).