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Lot Essay
By reproducing the abstract gestural mark with a squeegee, depicting it rather than actually making it with the brush, Richter disconnects the artistic act from the hand, and stylizes it as a mechanical mark that is absent of personal expression. It becomes a technical procedure until the eye transforms them into brilliant coloration and sympathetic kinetic movements, as here in Grün-Blau-Rot. Richter is questioning the notion that a gesture is subjective insofar as he reproduces similar gestures through a series of repetitions. Grün-Blau-Rot one of a group of canvases, all 11 x 15 inches (30 x 40 cm), all made using the same green, blue, and red palette. As a series, then, can we consider these works unique, and if not, should they be considered “authentic?” The question is a fraught one, yet in the case of Richter’s paintings, easily answered. While the act is a serial one, repeated numerous times, the image produced is not. Each one is slightly varied, and as such, unique.
The value placed on uniqueness and authenticity has continued into the twenty-first century and is second only to the question of intentionality in modernist painting in the twentieth century. Certainly by the twenty-first century, the notion of “chance,” of technical procedures that elude control or are eschewed by the author has become commonplace. However, much as Richter questions this first issue, uniqueness through producing in oil the over one hundred canvas that have been hung in his studio, he fully embraces in the chance accidents of facture that occur as he runs his squeegee over the surface. The marks left by the device—the horizontal striations that leave traces of its pass through the paint, or the sudden clean line that indicates Richter has lifted the blade off the surface only to start again elsewhere—are indices of the artist’s presence. These marks are not evidence of the artist’s psychic excitation, even as they excite the viewer, but are rather more like the marks of a machine operator whose brilliance and imaginative energy have left their marks. “I don’t have a specific picture in my mind’s eye. I want to end up with a picture that I haven’ planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined one… I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself” (G. Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990” (1990), in Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-2007, ed. D Elger and H. U. Obrist, trans. D. Britt, London, 2009), 256.
Extraordinary spatial tension inheres in Richter’s disposition of color in Grün-Blau-Rot. While temperature is linked to color—the primaries red and blue in opposition, red being warm, blue being cool—Richter encases the red, which should project, in stalagmites of green, arresting motion in the middle ground. Blue, which is recessive, interrupts red both by the sense that is overlaps it and is placed in contiguity to it, but also because a recessive color seems to hover frontally, on the shallow-most surface area. The green ground Richter has laid down is revealed through sharp swipes of the squeegee.
Like stop-action series by Eadweard Muybridge in which the physical progression of an act is recorded movement by movement, so, too, the Grün-Blau-Rot, is as if Richter has taken a single frame out of the moving image series and isolated it for the viewer’s delectation. A stunning moment in the arc of creating the entire series of over one hundred “acts” of abstraction, Grün-Blau-Rot finds its own character in that moment of unique artist expression.
The value placed on uniqueness and authenticity has continued into the twenty-first century and is second only to the question of intentionality in modernist painting in the twentieth century. Certainly by the twenty-first century, the notion of “chance,” of technical procedures that elude control or are eschewed by the author has become commonplace. However, much as Richter questions this first issue, uniqueness through producing in oil the over one hundred canvas that have been hung in his studio, he fully embraces in the chance accidents of facture that occur as he runs his squeegee over the surface. The marks left by the device—the horizontal striations that leave traces of its pass through the paint, or the sudden clean line that indicates Richter has lifted the blade off the surface only to start again elsewhere—are indices of the artist’s presence. These marks are not evidence of the artist’s psychic excitation, even as they excite the viewer, but are rather more like the marks of a machine operator whose brilliance and imaginative energy have left their marks. “I don’t have a specific picture in my mind’s eye. I want to end up with a picture that I haven’ planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined one… I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself” (G. Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990” (1990), in Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-2007, ed. D Elger and H. U. Obrist, trans. D. Britt, London, 2009), 256.
Extraordinary spatial tension inheres in Richter’s disposition of color in Grün-Blau-Rot. While temperature is linked to color—the primaries red and blue in opposition, red being warm, blue being cool—Richter encases the red, which should project, in stalagmites of green, arresting motion in the middle ground. Blue, which is recessive, interrupts red both by the sense that is overlaps it and is placed in contiguity to it, but also because a recessive color seems to hover frontally, on the shallow-most surface area. The green ground Richter has laid down is revealed through sharp swipes of the squeegee.
Like stop-action series by Eadweard Muybridge in which the physical progression of an act is recorded movement by movement, so, too, the Grün-Blau-Rot, is as if Richter has taken a single frame out of the moving image series and isolated it for the viewer’s delectation. A stunning moment in the arc of creating the entire series of over one hundred “acts” of abstraction, Grün-Blau-Rot finds its own character in that moment of unique artist expression.