.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
With its bands of burnished yellow glimmering over a shadowy void, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (678-2) pulsates with a restrained brilliance. Painted using the artist’s signature ‘squeegee’ technique, in which Richter applies and re-applies layers of paint, dragging them across the canvas to produce shimmering planes of color. In comparison with the overwhelming kaleidoscopes of colour of his other abstract works, here Richter employs a relatively reduced color palette, dominated by a rich, earthy yellow that glows against the expanses of dark grey and black that dominate the left and bottom sides of the canvas. In its compositional simplicity, the work achieves both a sense of clarity and imposing solidity, yet as is so common in Richter’s abstract work, these feelings of firm visual order are ultimately destabilised: the work’s fields of black and yellow give way to ever subtler variegations of grays and greens, while fiery tendrils of orange lick the work’s surface and coruscating flashes of sapphire and jade glint amid the gauze of paint. The effect is visually dazzling, as the work’s colours take on a kind of ethereal liquidity – a waterfall of colour frozen in the air – yet the work also possesses a fundamental earthiness, the layering of its paint serving to record geologically the process of its creation. Richter offers us a study of paint’s infinite malleability: both gleaming with light and cavernously dark, clumped in tactile clods of impasto and stretched into immersive clouds of gaseous colour.
Painted during the peak years of the artist’s celebrated abstract practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the work embodies the artist’s interrogations of order and chaos, its composition delicately poised between the two in typically Richter fashion. The linear structure of the artist’s ‘strokes’ visibly reflect the systematisation and repetition of the process, and yet at the same time, the extremely broad brush of Richter’s squeegee introduces elements of chance—whether in the unconsciously uneven application of pressure of paint on to the canvas, or the arbitrary patterns that each new coat of paint creates as it effaces the layer beneath it. Richter’s initial move into an abstract idiom was motivated by the desire to explore this disjunction between order and randomness, at odds with his photorealistic works’ technological, objective explorations of the nature of representation. He has described the way in which his early abstract paintings “allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming—that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original—then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Text, London, 2009, p. 256).
In one sense, Richter hearkens back to the pioneering abstract work of Jackson Pollock in the way in which his paintings seem to center the artistic process itself—yet at the same time, the underlying logic behind his practice veers away from the heart-on-sleeve expressionism and quasi-shamanism of Pollock. The slow, assiduous push and pull of paint across the canvas does not serve to mediate an emotional or even spiritual meaning as it does in Pollock, but instead offers a process out of which form emerges. Indeed, the works involve considered, conscious thought just as much as they do the caprice of paint’s physical behaviour under the squeegee, as with each new layer the artist adapts his work to the warp and weft of paint already applied to the canvas. It is on the one hand a case of “letting a thing come, rather than creating it,” as Richter has famously said, “[without] assertions, constructions, formulations, inventions, ideologies” (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1985’ in Hans-Ulrich Obrist ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, p. 119)—only “letting a thing come” becomes something that requires constant alteration, adjustment and erasure. “[A] picture emerges that may look quite good for a while, so airy and colourful and new. But that will only last for a day at most, at which point it starts to look cheap and fake. And then the real work begins—changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until it's done” (G. Richter, Panorama: A Retrospective, London, 2011, p. 17).
What is left is a painting that has nothing as its object beyond the interplay of its colors. The work is apparently void of any kind of representational meaning—yet at the same time it resists the Minimalist ‘autonomy’ captured in Frank Stella’s dictum that “what you see is what you see.” The brilliant visual energy that overflows from the surface of the work conjures something else—what Benjamin Buchloh describes in Richter as “the ability of colour to generate this emotional, spiritual quality [that] is presented and at the same time negated at all points, […] always cancelling itself out” (B. H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: October Files, Cambridge, MA, 2009, p. 118). Richter’s tonal brilliance and variety hint at meanings that begin to coalesce, only for them to dissolve when one tries to grasp it. The composition of Abstraktes Bild (678-2) brings this logic to life with sharp lucidity—a radiant cloud of color floating over a darkening void.
Painted during the peak years of the artist’s celebrated abstract practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the work embodies the artist’s interrogations of order and chaos, its composition delicately poised between the two in typically Richter fashion. The linear structure of the artist’s ‘strokes’ visibly reflect the systematisation and repetition of the process, and yet at the same time, the extremely broad brush of Richter’s squeegee introduces elements of chance—whether in the unconsciously uneven application of pressure of paint on to the canvas, or the arbitrary patterns that each new coat of paint creates as it effaces the layer beneath it. Richter’s initial move into an abstract idiom was motivated by the desire to explore this disjunction between order and randomness, at odds with his photorealistic works’ technological, objective explorations of the nature of representation. He has described the way in which his early abstract paintings “allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming—that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original—then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Text, London, 2009, p. 256).
In one sense, Richter hearkens back to the pioneering abstract work of Jackson Pollock in the way in which his paintings seem to center the artistic process itself—yet at the same time, the underlying logic behind his practice veers away from the heart-on-sleeve expressionism and quasi-shamanism of Pollock. The slow, assiduous push and pull of paint across the canvas does not serve to mediate an emotional or even spiritual meaning as it does in Pollock, but instead offers a process out of which form emerges. Indeed, the works involve considered, conscious thought just as much as they do the caprice of paint’s physical behaviour under the squeegee, as with each new layer the artist adapts his work to the warp and weft of paint already applied to the canvas. It is on the one hand a case of “letting a thing come, rather than creating it,” as Richter has famously said, “[without] assertions, constructions, formulations, inventions, ideologies” (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1985’ in Hans-Ulrich Obrist ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, p. 119)—only “letting a thing come” becomes something that requires constant alteration, adjustment and erasure. “[A] picture emerges that may look quite good for a while, so airy and colourful and new. But that will only last for a day at most, at which point it starts to look cheap and fake. And then the real work begins—changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until it's done” (G. Richter, Panorama: A Retrospective, London, 2011, p. 17).
What is left is a painting that has nothing as its object beyond the interplay of its colors. The work is apparently void of any kind of representational meaning—yet at the same time it resists the Minimalist ‘autonomy’ captured in Frank Stella’s dictum that “what you see is what you see.” The brilliant visual energy that overflows from the surface of the work conjures something else—what Benjamin Buchloh describes in Richter as “the ability of colour to generate this emotional, spiritual quality [that] is presented and at the same time negated at all points, […] always cancelling itself out” (B. H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: October Files, Cambridge, MA, 2009, p. 118). Richter’s tonal brilliance and variety hint at meanings that begin to coalesce, only for them to dissolve when one tries to grasp it. The composition of Abstraktes Bild (678-2) brings this logic to life with sharp lucidity—a radiant cloud of color floating over a darkening void.