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Lot Essay
A sublime demonstration of Gerhard Richter’s mastery over his technique, in which flashes of color sparkle and skitter across a luminous, jade-green surface, Abstraktes Bild is a rapturous painting from the best year of Richter’s abstract period. Painted in 1990, and resulting from countless hours of investigation and refinement, in which Richter’s squeegee is dragged and scraped, smoothed over with brushes only to begin again, Abstraktes Bild demonstrates the extreme surface complexity and extraordinary depth he has achieved during this celebrated time in his career.
In Abstraktes Bild, Richter manages to create a mirror-like surface that evokes watery depths, icy glaciers and the striations of precious gems and minerals. As if a jade stone were infused with a prismatic rainbow and liquified, the painting’s vast network of interconnected layers is suffused with every possible hue imaginable. Flashes of red, yellow, green, pink, blue and mauve punctuate the surface in staccato bursts that rise upward from the lower register; this riotous display of bright colors are like fireworks reflected over a jade-green pool.
Having adopted many different approaches to the canvas over his nearly sixty-year career, Richter has worked with various strategies of painterly investigation. It is widely acknowledged that his best period of pure abstraction was around 1990, making it concurrent to the present painting. By this time, and after a twenty year examination, the artist had truly come to a high degree of finesse and mastery over his “squeegee” technique. In Abstraktes Bild and other 1990 paintings, Richter worked slowly and methodically, using (in this case) a 4-ft tall apparatus that he scraped, smeared, and dragged across the painted surface. Because Richter would often wait until the pigment was almost dry before disturbing it, the friction caused by his squeegee being pulled across the paint created a series of craters and schisms. In this way, Richter’s squeegee invites chance and spontaneity yet still retains control over the process. Amazingly, Richter had found a way to remove the hand of the artist whilst still retaining the aura of the artist’s presence.
The German art historian Dieter Elger, writing in 2009, has further explained the phenomenon of Richter’s technique. He writes: “For Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start.” Indeed, the artist himself explained further, "It is a good technique for switching off thinking. Consciously, I can't calculate. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice 'between' state” (D. Elger & G. Richter, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, trans. E.M. Solaro, Chicago & London, 2009, p. 251).
In many ways, Richter’s abstract paintings defy interpretation. Their surfaces are painted, then erased; they are added to, then the paint is removed. In working in series and singles, Richter eschewed descriptive titles, naming them only Abstraktes Bild (or “abstract picture”), adding only the chronological number of the painting’s position within his worklist, which he has observed since 1963. And yet, time and again, Richter’s resolutely abstract paintings continually point to something outside of themselves, something deep and rich, full of the experience of life and the natural world. Perhaps this feeling is elaborated upon by similar paintings made between 1989 and 1990, which are indeed titled after natural phenomena, including Wald (“Forest”), Eis (“Ice”) and Rock. “They remind you of natural experiences, even rain if you like,” Richter explained. “The paintings can’t help functioning that way. That’s where they get their effect from, the fact that they incessantly remind you of nature…” (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H. Ulrich Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2008, p. 186).
In her review of Richter’s 1990 paintings in the New York Times in February of the same year, the art critic Roberta Smith also noticed this effect, writing: “More than ever, Mr. Richter is a brilliant tactician of the painted surface, a cool-handed mechanic whose work burns with a kind of heatless passion…As usual, the effect is at once synthetic and surprisingly naturalistic. The blurred light and implied speed of these surfaces can suggest giant pieces of film passing before the eyes…But these pocked, shimmering surfaces also suggest watery reflections, or surfaces of slowly melting ice…Some of the large paintings…may be among the best paintings Mr. Richter has ever made” (R. Smith, “Review/Art: Gerhard Richter: New Paintings,” The New York Times, February 9, 1990, p. C23).
As in Richter’s greatest paintings, prolonged looking rewards the viewer, and often—as is the case in the present example—the painting opens up, revealing a whole new world of complex inner relationships. A series of horizontal bands, alternating between dark and light, can be discerned within the middle register. They range from pure white to shadowy passages of green that are tinged with gray and mauve. A wonderful sense of depth emerges, as if one were standing before a rippling pool. Monet’s Water Lilies come to mind, as do Richter’s own paintings of icebergs (1982), and mirrors (1989-1991). Although the painting is resolutely abstract, the richness of its colors and the intensity of its mystical depths conjures up the sublime, awe-inspiring paintings of the great German Romantics, especially Caspar David Friedrich (who also famously tackled icebergs and other majestic vistas of the natural world). There is something of the Pre-Raphaelites too, including Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2; Tate Britain), and even the shimmering, patterned and bejeweled paintings of Gustav Klimt, in these paintings. Like Richter himself, Abstraktes Bild is a painting full of contractions—serene yet riotous; smooth but fractured; monochromatic yet comprising a veritable rainbow beneath its surface.
In Abstraktes Bild, Richter manages to create a mirror-like surface that evokes watery depths, icy glaciers and the striations of precious gems and minerals. As if a jade stone were infused with a prismatic rainbow and liquified, the painting’s vast network of interconnected layers is suffused with every possible hue imaginable. Flashes of red, yellow, green, pink, blue and mauve punctuate the surface in staccato bursts that rise upward from the lower register; this riotous display of bright colors are like fireworks reflected over a jade-green pool.
Having adopted many different approaches to the canvas over his nearly sixty-year career, Richter has worked with various strategies of painterly investigation. It is widely acknowledged that his best period of pure abstraction was around 1990, making it concurrent to the present painting. By this time, and after a twenty year examination, the artist had truly come to a high degree of finesse and mastery over his “squeegee” technique. In Abstraktes Bild and other 1990 paintings, Richter worked slowly and methodically, using (in this case) a 4-ft tall apparatus that he scraped, smeared, and dragged across the painted surface. Because Richter would often wait until the pigment was almost dry before disturbing it, the friction caused by his squeegee being pulled across the paint created a series of craters and schisms. In this way, Richter’s squeegee invites chance and spontaneity yet still retains control over the process. Amazingly, Richter had found a way to remove the hand of the artist whilst still retaining the aura of the artist’s presence.
The German art historian Dieter Elger, writing in 2009, has further explained the phenomenon of Richter’s technique. He writes: “For Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start.” Indeed, the artist himself explained further, "It is a good technique for switching off thinking. Consciously, I can't calculate. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice 'between' state” (D. Elger & G. Richter, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, trans. E.M. Solaro, Chicago & London, 2009, p. 251).
In many ways, Richter’s abstract paintings defy interpretation. Their surfaces are painted, then erased; they are added to, then the paint is removed. In working in series and singles, Richter eschewed descriptive titles, naming them only Abstraktes Bild (or “abstract picture”), adding only the chronological number of the painting’s position within his worklist, which he has observed since 1963. And yet, time and again, Richter’s resolutely abstract paintings continually point to something outside of themselves, something deep and rich, full of the experience of life and the natural world. Perhaps this feeling is elaborated upon by similar paintings made between 1989 and 1990, which are indeed titled after natural phenomena, including Wald (“Forest”), Eis (“Ice”) and Rock. “They remind you of natural experiences, even rain if you like,” Richter explained. “The paintings can’t help functioning that way. That’s where they get their effect from, the fact that they incessantly remind you of nature…” (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H. Ulrich Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2008, p. 186).
In her review of Richter’s 1990 paintings in the New York Times in February of the same year, the art critic Roberta Smith also noticed this effect, writing: “More than ever, Mr. Richter is a brilliant tactician of the painted surface, a cool-handed mechanic whose work burns with a kind of heatless passion…As usual, the effect is at once synthetic and surprisingly naturalistic. The blurred light and implied speed of these surfaces can suggest giant pieces of film passing before the eyes…But these pocked, shimmering surfaces also suggest watery reflections, or surfaces of slowly melting ice…Some of the large paintings…may be among the best paintings Mr. Richter has ever made” (R. Smith, “Review/Art: Gerhard Richter: New Paintings,” The New York Times, February 9, 1990, p. C23).
As in Richter’s greatest paintings, prolonged looking rewards the viewer, and often—as is the case in the present example—the painting opens up, revealing a whole new world of complex inner relationships. A series of horizontal bands, alternating between dark and light, can be discerned within the middle register. They range from pure white to shadowy passages of green that are tinged with gray and mauve. A wonderful sense of depth emerges, as if one were standing before a rippling pool. Monet’s Water Lilies come to mind, as do Richter’s own paintings of icebergs (1982), and mirrors (1989-1991). Although the painting is resolutely abstract, the richness of its colors and the intensity of its mystical depths conjures up the sublime, awe-inspiring paintings of the great German Romantics, especially Caspar David Friedrich (who also famously tackled icebergs and other majestic vistas of the natural world). There is something of the Pre-Raphaelites too, including Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2; Tate Britain), and even the shimmering, patterned and bejeweled paintings of Gustav Klimt, in these paintings. Like Richter himself, Abstraktes Bild is a painting full of contractions—serene yet riotous; smooth but fractured; monochromatic yet comprising a veritable rainbow beneath its surface.