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Lot Essay
‘With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood.’ – Gerhard Richter
Almost all the abstract paintings show scenarios, surroundings and landscapes that don’t exist, but they create the impression that they could exist. As though they were photographs of scenarios and regions that had never yet been seen.’ – Gerhard Richter
‘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
Painted in 1990, at the height of Gerhard Richter’s abstract practice, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) presents a spectacular panorama of rippling colour that entirely fills the canvas. Streaks of thick black paint punctuate a serene expanse of periwinkle, lavender, pale pink, and dove grey reminiscent of a sunset reflected in water. Vibrant red and aquamarine pour in from the left-hand side but are barricaded by an archipelago of black. The richly textured canvas presents a complexity of strata, as intricate as a bark rubbing. Abstraktes Bild was painted using Richter’s signature squeegee technique in which the artist drags paint across the canvas to produce iridescent blurs of colour, in a gesture that is both methodical and suspenseful, slowly working the paint along the canvas. In Abstraktes Bild, the result is a meditation on chromatic relations, a destabilization of visual order as colours succumb to one another beneath the bold black. The paintings created between 1989 and 1994 are thought to be the clearest distillation of Richter’s exploration of abstraction. Major cycles of work produced during this period include his Bach suite, in the collection of the Modern Museet, Stockholm, and the Ice paintings, held at the Art Institute Chicago. In certain ways, Abstraktes Bild recalls works by the Abstract Expressionists including Jackson Pollock, with the same overwhelming evidence of process and technique. Yet unlike Pollock, Richter never relies purely on chance, thus confronting the belief of mythic spontaneity within Abstract Expressionism. Of his squeegee method, he has said, ‘It is a good technique for switching of thinking. Consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice “between” state’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehof, ‘Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei’, Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20). Using the squeegee allows Richter to acknowledge his Modernist inheritance, while simultaneously remaining distrustful of its ideologies. Furthermore, the artist’s penchant for working on multiple paintings concurrently belies the Modernist narrative of a linear art history. Instead of reimagining Abstract Expressionists’ investigation of formal relations, Richter’s canvases are self-consciously emotive and associative. Since the 1960s, Richter has played with the relationship between abstraction and figuration, and such works lay the foundation for his turn to complete abstraction; these canvases suggest that abstraction can be both an erasure and an insertion, a space for recognition and distance, a build-up and a break-down. Richter has said that ‘abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which we may nevertheless conclude exists’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’ in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Chicago, 1988, p. 107). With its abundant and overpowering explosion of colour, Abstraktes Bild illuminates a world, unknown and illusory, but nevertheless real.
Almost all the abstract paintings show scenarios, surroundings and landscapes that don’t exist, but they create the impression that they could exist. As though they were photographs of scenarios and regions that had never yet been seen.’ – Gerhard Richter
‘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
Painted in 1990, at the height of Gerhard Richter’s abstract practice, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) presents a spectacular panorama of rippling colour that entirely fills the canvas. Streaks of thick black paint punctuate a serene expanse of periwinkle, lavender, pale pink, and dove grey reminiscent of a sunset reflected in water. Vibrant red and aquamarine pour in from the left-hand side but are barricaded by an archipelago of black. The richly textured canvas presents a complexity of strata, as intricate as a bark rubbing. Abstraktes Bild was painted using Richter’s signature squeegee technique in which the artist drags paint across the canvas to produce iridescent blurs of colour, in a gesture that is both methodical and suspenseful, slowly working the paint along the canvas. In Abstraktes Bild, the result is a meditation on chromatic relations, a destabilization of visual order as colours succumb to one another beneath the bold black. The paintings created between 1989 and 1994 are thought to be the clearest distillation of Richter’s exploration of abstraction. Major cycles of work produced during this period include his Bach suite, in the collection of the Modern Museet, Stockholm, and the Ice paintings, held at the Art Institute Chicago. In certain ways, Abstraktes Bild recalls works by the Abstract Expressionists including Jackson Pollock, with the same overwhelming evidence of process and technique. Yet unlike Pollock, Richter never relies purely on chance, thus confronting the belief of mythic spontaneity within Abstract Expressionism. Of his squeegee method, he has said, ‘It is a good technique for switching of thinking. Consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice “between” state’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehof, ‘Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei’, Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20). Using the squeegee allows Richter to acknowledge his Modernist inheritance, while simultaneously remaining distrustful of its ideologies. Furthermore, the artist’s penchant for working on multiple paintings concurrently belies the Modernist narrative of a linear art history. Instead of reimagining Abstract Expressionists’ investigation of formal relations, Richter’s canvases are self-consciously emotive and associative. Since the 1960s, Richter has played with the relationship between abstraction and figuration, and such works lay the foundation for his turn to complete abstraction; these canvases suggest that abstraction can be both an erasure and an insertion, a space for recognition and distance, a build-up and a break-down. Richter has said that ‘abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which we may nevertheless conclude exists’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’ in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Chicago, 1988, p. 107). With its abundant and overpowering explosion of colour, Abstraktes Bild illuminates a world, unknown and illusory, but nevertheless real.