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Lot Essay
‘I applied the paint in evenly spaced patches, or blobs, on the canvas. Not flowing any system at all, there were black and white blobs of paint, which I joined up with a brush until there was no bare canvas left uncovered and all the colour patches were joined and merged into grey. I stopped when this was done’
(G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 127).
Gerhard Richter’s Vermalung, 1972, is a stunning example from one of the artist’s most intriguing series; the Inpaintings. Situated between his photorealist paintings of the early 1960s and his freely improvised coloured abstractions first developed in the 1970s, Vermalung was a fundamental step in Richter’s investigations into reality and representation. Richter was attempting to find alternative methods of expressing his creative ideals outside the photo-realist style which had dominated the early part of his career. Vermalung displays the artist’s extraordinary mastery of the brush, distributed varying grey tones of paint in seemingly infinite, meandering paths over the entire canvas. The fluid traces of pigment suspended in oil interpenetrate to form a dense thatch that is no longer a fixed point of view, leaving the eye to wander over the surface. The work abounds with magnificently swirling brushstrokes, causing the canvas to appear almost three-dimensional in its tactility. Richter elaborates, ‘I applied the paint in evenly spaced patches, or blobs, on the canvas. Not flowing any system at all, there were black and white blobs of paint, which I joined up with a brush until there was no bare canvas left uncovered and all the colour patches were joined and merged into grey. I stopped when this was done’ (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 127). Richter was listening to the music of John Cage while he painted and later titled the Cage paintings after the musician. He has long been interested in Cage’s ideas about ambient sound and silence.
The Inpaintings represent a critical bridge between Richter’s photo-paintings and the Abstraktes Bilder that he would commence several years later. Having first covered a photorealist image with swirls of grey pigment in his early painting Tisch, 1962, it was in the late 1960s when Richter began to fully experiment with grey for the purposes of abstraction, most notably in his grey monochromes and subsequently in his Inpaintings. Of this period Richter said, ‘When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over...I observed differences of quality among the grey 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). Vermalung is a powerful distillation of Richter’s themes; a remarkable exercise in the tangible potential of a paint surface that perfectly encapsulates the incredible balance between inscrutability and sensuality that underpins his oeuvre.
(G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 127).
Gerhard Richter’s Vermalung, 1972, is a stunning example from one of the artist’s most intriguing series; the Inpaintings. Situated between his photorealist paintings of the early 1960s and his freely improvised coloured abstractions first developed in the 1970s, Vermalung was a fundamental step in Richter’s investigations into reality and representation. Richter was attempting to find alternative methods of expressing his creative ideals outside the photo-realist style which had dominated the early part of his career. Vermalung displays the artist’s extraordinary mastery of the brush, distributed varying grey tones of paint in seemingly infinite, meandering paths over the entire canvas. The fluid traces of pigment suspended in oil interpenetrate to form a dense thatch that is no longer a fixed point of view, leaving the eye to wander over the surface. The work abounds with magnificently swirling brushstrokes, causing the canvas to appear almost three-dimensional in its tactility. Richter elaborates, ‘I applied the paint in evenly spaced patches, or blobs, on the canvas. Not flowing any system at all, there were black and white blobs of paint, which I joined up with a brush until there was no bare canvas left uncovered and all the colour patches were joined and merged into grey. I stopped when this was done’ (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 127). Richter was listening to the music of John Cage while he painted and later titled the Cage paintings after the musician. He has long been interested in Cage’s ideas about ambient sound and silence.
The Inpaintings represent a critical bridge between Richter’s photo-paintings and the Abstraktes Bilder that he would commence several years later. Having first covered a photorealist image with swirls of grey pigment in his early painting Tisch, 1962, it was in the late 1960s when Richter began to fully experiment with grey for the purposes of abstraction, most notably in his grey monochromes and subsequently in his Inpaintings. Of this period Richter said, ‘When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over...I observed differences of quality among the grey 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). Vermalung is a powerful distillation of Richter’s themes; a remarkable exercise in the tangible potential of a paint surface that perfectly encapsulates the incredible balance between inscrutability and sensuality that underpins his oeuvre.