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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming volume 2 of the Gerhard Richter. Catalogue raisonné, edited by Dietmar Elger for the Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden, as cat. no. 325-13, to be published later this year.
"In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, 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 colour (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualizable: 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." (G. Richter, Text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982, in D. Elgar, Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, New York, 2009, p. 121)
"In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, 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 colour (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualizable: 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." (G. Richter, Text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982, in D. Elgar, Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, New York, 2009, p. 121)