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Lot Essay
‘For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again ... It would be something of a symbolic trick: bringing to light the lost, buried pictures, or something to that effect’
GERHARD RICHTER
‘Richter has taken to flaying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’
ROBERT STORR
With its deliquescent palette and hypnotic marbled textures, Abstraktes Bild (775-4) is a mesmeric abstract vision from the height of Gerhard Richter’s practice. Glistening bands of colour cascade down the length of the picture plane, tumbling in jewelled tones of emerald, purple and cerulean blue. Using the squeegee – his signature tool since the 1980s – Richter builds shimmering layers of paint, guiding his pigment across the canvas in sweeping horizontal strokes. On top of this rich terrain, the artist carves thick vertical striations using the hard edge of a palette knife, disrupting, exposing and entangling the strata of paint beneath. Rills of paint run up like tides alongside each ribbon of colour, interspersed by broad apertures that reveal the work’s rich geological make-up. Like light refracted through a waterfall, veils of colour emerge and dissolve, colliding and intermingling with prismatic splendour. Painted in 1992, the same year that the artist first exhibited his large-scale abstracts to international acclaim at Documenta IX, the work dates from a triumphal moment in Richter’s career, in which his long-running thesis on the possibilities of painting reached its peak. The confluence of palette knife and squeegee, in the manner of the present work, gave rise to some of Richter’s most distinctive compositions during this period, with examples held in the Sammlung Würth, Künzlesau, the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. ‘Richter has taken to flaying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes’, wrote Robert Storr, ‘leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’ (R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 81). It is a statement that speaks directly to the present work.
By 1992, Richter’s three-decade long enquiry into the nature of abstraction had reached new, unprecedented heights. What had begun in the 1960s as a series of greyscale photorealist paintings had, by this stage, evolved into a finely-tuned dialogue between chance and control. Flowing freely across the canvas, yet punctuated by the artist’s interventions at choice moments, Richter’s abstract painterly profusions glimmered with tantalising hints of known realities. In 1992, the artist explained how, ‘For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process, I don’t actually reveal what was beneath. If I wanted to do that, I would have to think what to reveal (figurative pictures or signs or patterns); that is, pictures that might as well be produced direct. It would be something of a symbolic trick: bringing to light the lost, buried pictures, or something to that effect’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1992’ in H-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 245). For over thirty years, Richter’s practice had rigorously explored the relationship between figuration and abstraction. By deliberately subtracting layers of paint from his compositions, as in the present work, the artist probes the viewer’s innate tendency to read reality in even the most unplanned painterly surfaces. As we delve into its complex depths, seeking jungles, forests and underwater kingdoms, the promise of figurative enlightenment is continually deflected. This, for Richter, was the fundamental lie of all image-making: in the seductive surfaces of his palette knife compositions, he came closer than ever to exposing it.
The early 1990s marked a transformation in Richter’s international reception. His breakthrough retrospective was held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1991, while Documenta IX the following year constituted the first major presentation of his work in Germany since the showing of 18 October 1977 in Krefeld in 1989. In 1993 he received a major touring retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993, curated by Kasper König and accompanied by a three volume catalogue raisonné edited by Benjamin Buchloch. This exhibition, containing 130 works carried out over the course of thirty years, propelled him onto a new global stage. It was, simultaneously, a period that saw the production of some of his finest works, including the landmark cycle of Bach paintings now held in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Foreshadowing many of the qualities of these works, Abstraktes Bild (775-4) harnesses the sublime coincidence of wet-on-wet paint to exquisite effect, creating a fluid horizontal underlay. However, whilst this dynamic is very much brought to the foreground in the Bach paintings, the present work overwrites the left-to-right motion with the broad vertical incisions of the palette knife. Like a geological cross-section, or an archaeological dig, the process of subtraction spawns new possibilities. As the palette knife travels from top to bottom in parallel planes, it performs an act of excavation, revealing the underlying structure that so many of his squeegeed works sought to obscure. ‘With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood’, Richter once claimed (G. Richter, quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). In the volatile, shifting surface of the present work, the artist offers momentary glimpses of a realm that lies just beyond the limits of our perception.
GERHARD RICHTER
‘Richter has taken to flaying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’
ROBERT STORR
With its deliquescent palette and hypnotic marbled textures, Abstraktes Bild (775-4) is a mesmeric abstract vision from the height of Gerhard Richter’s practice. Glistening bands of colour cascade down the length of the picture plane, tumbling in jewelled tones of emerald, purple and cerulean blue. Using the squeegee – his signature tool since the 1980s – Richter builds shimmering layers of paint, guiding his pigment across the canvas in sweeping horizontal strokes. On top of this rich terrain, the artist carves thick vertical striations using the hard edge of a palette knife, disrupting, exposing and entangling the strata of paint beneath. Rills of paint run up like tides alongside each ribbon of colour, interspersed by broad apertures that reveal the work’s rich geological make-up. Like light refracted through a waterfall, veils of colour emerge and dissolve, colliding and intermingling with prismatic splendour. Painted in 1992, the same year that the artist first exhibited his large-scale abstracts to international acclaim at Documenta IX, the work dates from a triumphal moment in Richter’s career, in which his long-running thesis on the possibilities of painting reached its peak. The confluence of palette knife and squeegee, in the manner of the present work, gave rise to some of Richter’s most distinctive compositions during this period, with examples held in the Sammlung Würth, Künzlesau, the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. ‘Richter has taken to flaying the painted skin of his canvases with a spatula in broad strokes or long, wavering stripes’, wrote Robert Storr, ‘leaving behind abraded, shimmering surfaces that at their sheerest and most luminous look like the Aurora Borealis suspended above various red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet planets’ (R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 81). It is a statement that speaks directly to the present work.
By 1992, Richter’s three-decade long enquiry into the nature of abstraction had reached new, unprecedented heights. What had begun in the 1960s as a series of greyscale photorealist paintings had, by this stage, evolved into a finely-tuned dialogue between chance and control. Flowing freely across the canvas, yet punctuated by the artist’s interventions at choice moments, Richter’s abstract painterly profusions glimmered with tantalising hints of known realities. In 1992, the artist explained how, ‘For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process, I don’t actually reveal what was beneath. If I wanted to do that, I would have to think what to reveal (figurative pictures or signs or patterns); that is, pictures that might as well be produced direct. It would be something of a symbolic trick: bringing to light the lost, buried pictures, or something to that effect’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1992’ in H-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 245). For over thirty years, Richter’s practice had rigorously explored the relationship between figuration and abstraction. By deliberately subtracting layers of paint from his compositions, as in the present work, the artist probes the viewer’s innate tendency to read reality in even the most unplanned painterly surfaces. As we delve into its complex depths, seeking jungles, forests and underwater kingdoms, the promise of figurative enlightenment is continually deflected. This, for Richter, was the fundamental lie of all image-making: in the seductive surfaces of his palette knife compositions, he came closer than ever to exposing it.
The early 1990s marked a transformation in Richter’s international reception. His breakthrough retrospective was held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1991, while Documenta IX the following year constituted the first major presentation of his work in Germany since the showing of 18 October 1977 in Krefeld in 1989. In 1993 he received a major touring retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993, curated by Kasper König and accompanied by a three volume catalogue raisonné edited by Benjamin Buchloch. This exhibition, containing 130 works carried out over the course of thirty years, propelled him onto a new global stage. It was, simultaneously, a period that saw the production of some of his finest works, including the landmark cycle of Bach paintings now held in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Foreshadowing many of the qualities of these works, Abstraktes Bild (775-4) harnesses the sublime coincidence of wet-on-wet paint to exquisite effect, creating a fluid horizontal underlay. However, whilst this dynamic is very much brought to the foreground in the Bach paintings, the present work overwrites the left-to-right motion with the broad vertical incisions of the palette knife. Like a geological cross-section, or an archaeological dig, the process of subtraction spawns new possibilities. As the palette knife travels from top to bottom in parallel planes, it performs an act of excavation, revealing the underlying structure that so many of his squeegeed works sought to obscure. ‘With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood’, Richter once claimed (G. Richter, quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). In the volatile, shifting surface of the present work, the artist offers momentary glimpses of a realm that lies just beyond the limits of our perception.