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Lot Essay
Held in the Rokkedal Collection, Denmark, since 2001, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild offers an expressive panorama of vivid colour. Painted in 1984, contemporaneous to his participation in the landmark exhibition From Here: Two Months of New German Art in Düsseldorf, the work marks a watershed moment in the artist’s career during which he fully committed to an abstracted language: other paintings from this period are held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Against an electric ground—the glassy blue of an unblemished sky—Richter has painted chestnut brown bands, while a gleaming white spreads across the picture plane; vivid slivers of red and forest green anchor the composition. By emphasising the soft backdrop beneath the gestural brushwork, Richter reveals his painterly process; describing his methods, he explained, ‘A picture like this is painted in different layers, separated by intervals of time. The first layer mostly represents the background, which has a photographic, illusionistic look to it, though done without using a photograph. This first, smooth, soft-edged paint surface is like a finished picture; but after a while I decide that I understand it or have seen enough of it, and in the next stage of painting I partly destroy it, partly add to it; and so it goes on at intervals, till there is nothing more to do and the picture is finished’ (G. Richter, quoted in H.-U. Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 112).
Richter’s journey towards complete abstraction was one defined by technical and theoretical experimentation. Until the late 1960s, he had focused almost entirely on photorealistic images: using photographs provided the artist with the ostensibly objective subject matter that he sought. Although seemingly opposed to them, the Abstrakte Bilder in fact descend from these photorealist works. In both, Richter blurs and obscures his paint in order to probe the medium’s capacity for revelation. As curator Richard Cork observed of the Abstrakte Bilder, ‘The blurring that resulted from the horizontal or diagonal striations seemed to have connections with his earlier habit of pulling a brush over the wet surface of his photo-based canvases. So, a continuity became apparent, founded above all on his perennial need to alter the image he had already constructed’ (R. Cork, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter, exh. cat. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 1991, p. 8). Visually powerful and conceptually arresting, the abstract works dating from the mid-1980s and early 1990s stand among the most successful of these painterly investigations.
While aesthetically the Abstrakte Bilder may recall the work of earlier abstract artists, Richter has no desire to pay homage to his predecessors. Instead, these canvases address the problems of painting and the difficulties that confront its contemporary practitioners, who must face up to the medium’s long and weighty history. Although nonrepresentational, these works often suggest figural readings. ‘What I’m attempting in each picture,’ Richter has reflected, ‘is nothing other than this: to bring together, in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom. Not paradise’ (G. Richter, quoted in B. Buchloh, ‘Interview with Gerhard Richter’, in Gerhard Richter Paintings, New York 1988, p. 29). Applying his pigments with brushes, spatulas, and squeegees, Richter encourages a new relationship between abstraction and image; under his deft hand, the Abstrakte Bilder offer a vision of new horizons.
Richter’s journey towards complete abstraction was one defined by technical and theoretical experimentation. Until the late 1960s, he had focused almost entirely on photorealistic images: using photographs provided the artist with the ostensibly objective subject matter that he sought. Although seemingly opposed to them, the Abstrakte Bilder in fact descend from these photorealist works. In both, Richter blurs and obscures his paint in order to probe the medium’s capacity for revelation. As curator Richard Cork observed of the Abstrakte Bilder, ‘The blurring that resulted from the horizontal or diagonal striations seemed to have connections with his earlier habit of pulling a brush over the wet surface of his photo-based canvases. So, a continuity became apparent, founded above all on his perennial need to alter the image he had already constructed’ (R. Cork, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter, exh. cat. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 1991, p. 8). Visually powerful and conceptually arresting, the abstract works dating from the mid-1980s and early 1990s stand among the most successful of these painterly investigations.
While aesthetically the Abstrakte Bilder may recall the work of earlier abstract artists, Richter has no desire to pay homage to his predecessors. Instead, these canvases address the problems of painting and the difficulties that confront its contemporary practitioners, who must face up to the medium’s long and weighty history. Although nonrepresentational, these works often suggest figural readings. ‘What I’m attempting in each picture,’ Richter has reflected, ‘is nothing other than this: to bring together, in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom. Not paradise’ (G. Richter, quoted in B. Buchloh, ‘Interview with Gerhard Richter’, in Gerhard Richter Paintings, New York 1988, p. 29). Applying his pigments with brushes, spatulas, and squeegees, Richter encourages a new relationship between abstraction and image; under his deft hand, the Abstrakte Bilder offer a vision of new horizons.