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Lot Essay
‘It is a good technique for switching off thinking, [...] consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice “between” state.’
—GERHARD RICHTER
Grün-Blau-Rot (für Parkett 35) ((Green-Blue-Red) for Parkett 35) (1993) is a sumptuous study in the artist’s famed squeegee technique. The work reflects Richter at the height of his abstract powers; using the squeegee to drag paint across the canvas in striated smears, Richter produces a small-scale iridescent jewel. With its volcanic red spilling over layers of green and a cavernous dark blue, this is a work particularly concerned with the interactions of colour; while the majority of Richter’s abstract works are simply entitled Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), deliberately attempting to strip away any connotations for the viewer, in this series the artist uses his title to draw our attention to the three simple colours that make up each composition: green, blue and red.
As the critic and art historian Robert Storr has said of Richter, "it is hard to think of him as anything other than one of the great colorists of late twentieth-century painting" (R. Storr, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 70), and in the Grün-Blau-Rot paintings, we see the artist exploring and experimenting with colour relationships to compelling effect. Mirroring the red-green-blue model used to theorise colour perception since the nineteenth century, the works present a distilled, essentialised vision of colour; Richter’s squeegee technique serves to disassociate an invasive artistic consciousness from the work itself, allowing the colours to speak for themselves. 'It is a good technique for switching off thinking’ the artist says, ‘Consciously, I can't calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice "between" state' (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, 'Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei', in Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20).
—GERHARD RICHTER
Grün-Blau-Rot (für Parkett 35) ((Green-Blue-Red) for Parkett 35) (1993) is a sumptuous study in the artist’s famed squeegee technique. The work reflects Richter at the height of his abstract powers; using the squeegee to drag paint across the canvas in striated smears, Richter produces a small-scale iridescent jewel. With its volcanic red spilling over layers of green and a cavernous dark blue, this is a work particularly concerned with the interactions of colour; while the majority of Richter’s abstract works are simply entitled Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), deliberately attempting to strip away any connotations for the viewer, in this series the artist uses his title to draw our attention to the three simple colours that make up each composition: green, blue and red.
As the critic and art historian Robert Storr has said of Richter, "it is hard to think of him as anything other than one of the great colorists of late twentieth-century painting" (R. Storr, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 70), and in the Grün-Blau-Rot paintings, we see the artist exploring and experimenting with colour relationships to compelling effect. Mirroring the red-green-blue model used to theorise colour perception since the nineteenth century, the works present a distilled, essentialised vision of colour; Richter’s squeegee technique serves to disassociate an invasive artistic consciousness from the work itself, allowing the colours to speak for themselves. 'It is a good technique for switching off thinking’ the artist says, ‘Consciously, I can't calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice "between" state' (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, 'Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei', in Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20).