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Lot Essay
Stunning high-keyed colors, excavated horizontal striations and glyphs in the shape of scattered, disordered and unhinged geometric forms against a luminous ground, Abstraktes Bild (522-1) is an ebullient syntheses of photography and painting, in which a mere photo snapshot becomes the basis of painterly elaboration of the most imaginative expression. Among the “Free Abstracts” of the mid-1980s, Abstraktes Bild is the locus for Richter’s recursive layering and effacing technique whereby the ground, in this case a random detail from a photograph of an early sketch, which is then blown up and serves as the ground for overpainting. Richter foregrounds paint itself, the sensuality of its dried and liquescent textures and the sheer opticality of its chroma. Abstraktes Bild is painted and carved, so to speak, out of ribbon-like strokes and the scraped facture of the surface. Photograph and paint conflate, giving rise to the “Free Abstract” a loose melding of depicted schematic shapes and their referents. The present work features a pyramidal shape, so named in one of the works in this series of paintings made virtually simultaneously. Hoisted on walls in the studio, Richter moves from canvas to canvas going into the surface, pulling back, adjusting each in an almost spontaneous relational dance. After his preoccupations with grey monochrome paintings in the early 1970s, Richter reengages with animating color by conflating polychrome impasto and with the gloss and finish of the photographic surface. The goal here was to create a newly complex surface. Photographing details of a previously painted abstract surface at different angles, he then reproduces in paint, a composite of that work retaining its gestural qualities.
The dissolution of form calls to mind the flattening of illusionistic volumes in Cubism, perhaps the multidirectional tubular forms of Fernand Léger. Further, this conceit brings to mind the use of symbolic numbers and primitive shapes used by Abstract Expressionists from Adolf Gottlieb to Robert Motherwell. The broad sweep of the central motif brings unity to the discrete surface textures. This undulating falling vermillion band is countered by a pink shapes that seem like forms emerging from surrealist mindscape by Tanguy. The range of associations a work by Richter calls up is a reflection of the manner in which his startlingly imaginative abstractions weave forms across the field over and behind the bright hues to create a striking essay of contrasts in chroma and directional force.
Richter improvised his own means of making such marks using his large-scale squeegees, which he rakes over several painted layers in broad horizontal and vertical arcs. Enlisting non-art instruments for artistic ends is only one of several means by which Richter interrogates the medium and the role of intentionality in art making. Richter’s contrapuntal disposition of color, texture, and rhythmic displacement is striking for its compositional complexity. This example was executed during an extraordinarily fecund period in the 1980s when Richter developed pictorial abstraction to a heightened pitch. “… I was trying to combine constructive elements in paintings with areas that contained destructive elements–a balance between composition and anti-composition, if you like…” (G. Richter, “On Abstract Painting,” in Writings: 1962-2007, New York, 2009, p. 270). Having emerged from the artistic regime of enforced Social Realism in East Germany, Richter was also suspicious of the claims for Abstract Expressionism to which he was exposed upon moving to West Germany in 1961. Resistant to gestural expression, which he considered pretentious and false, Richter was invested in refusing the notion of genius, the individual authorial hand, and notions of a continuous evolution of historical style. Denying emotive content and associative references in painting was a conscious goal, then as now. For Richter, paintings are fictive realities, yet realities of painting per se, and so the artist consciously imprints his surfaces, foregrounding textural traces of the act of painting with concrete specificity. Richter’s abstractions reside in their minute differentiations one from the other and the infinitesimal degree of choices open to the artist and the beholder. The chance operations Richter employs assert that all marks and pictorial incident are equally valid and that all results are worthy of the viewer’s interest. Richter’s fusion, or rather democratization, of color also declares that no color is pre-eminent, nor does one or the other carry particular affective dominance. That these works are non-compositional in the sense that they do not come from traditional organization, of parts balancing a whole, of relational painting makes them both compelling and mysterious.
The dissolution of form calls to mind the flattening of illusionistic volumes in Cubism, perhaps the multidirectional tubular forms of Fernand Léger. Further, this conceit brings to mind the use of symbolic numbers and primitive shapes used by Abstract Expressionists from Adolf Gottlieb to Robert Motherwell. The broad sweep of the central motif brings unity to the discrete surface textures. This undulating falling vermillion band is countered by a pink shapes that seem like forms emerging from surrealist mindscape by Tanguy. The range of associations a work by Richter calls up is a reflection of the manner in which his startlingly imaginative abstractions weave forms across the field over and behind the bright hues to create a striking essay of contrasts in chroma and directional force.
Richter improvised his own means of making such marks using his large-scale squeegees, which he rakes over several painted layers in broad horizontal and vertical arcs. Enlisting non-art instruments for artistic ends is only one of several means by which Richter interrogates the medium and the role of intentionality in art making. Richter’s contrapuntal disposition of color, texture, and rhythmic displacement is striking for its compositional complexity. This example was executed during an extraordinarily fecund period in the 1980s when Richter developed pictorial abstraction to a heightened pitch. “… I was trying to combine constructive elements in paintings with areas that contained destructive elements–a balance between composition and anti-composition, if you like…” (G. Richter, “On Abstract Painting,” in Writings: 1962-2007, New York, 2009, p. 270). Having emerged from the artistic regime of enforced Social Realism in East Germany, Richter was also suspicious of the claims for Abstract Expressionism to which he was exposed upon moving to West Germany in 1961. Resistant to gestural expression, which he considered pretentious and false, Richter was invested in refusing the notion of genius, the individual authorial hand, and notions of a continuous evolution of historical style. Denying emotive content and associative references in painting was a conscious goal, then as now. For Richter, paintings are fictive realities, yet realities of painting per se, and so the artist consciously imprints his surfaces, foregrounding textural traces of the act of painting with concrete specificity. Richter’s abstractions reside in their minute differentiations one from the other and the infinitesimal degree of choices open to the artist and the beholder. The chance operations Richter employs assert that all marks and pictorial incident are equally valid and that all results are worthy of the viewer’s interest. Richter’s fusion, or rather democratization, of color also declares that no color is pre-eminent, nor does one or the other carry particular affective dominance. That these works are non-compositional in the sense that they do not come from traditional organization, of parts balancing a whole, of relational painting makes them both compelling and mysterious.