Vermalung (Grau)

Given Richter’s statement on the color’s ability to operate in a similar way to photography in terms of accurately portraying reality, it is no surprise that his gray monochromes follow on directly from his photo-realist paintings, or could even be considered an extension of them. Having first covered a photorealist image with swirls of gray pigment in his early work Table (Tisch), 1962, it was in 1968 when Richter began to fully experiment with gray for the purposes of abstraction, painting over canvases and dissolving the figurative into the monochrome in a manner which recalled his gray-scale color charts from 1966. Of this period Richter said ‘When I first painted a number of canvases gray all over...I observed differences of quality among the gray surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive statement; it became relative perfection, beauty, and therefore painting’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, in H. Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 82).