Ohne Titel (9.4.86)

Constantly shifting and changing before our eyes, Ohne Titel (9.4.86) is endlessly evocative with infinite potential, justifying its own creation and Gerhard Richter's own vocation. Possessing the same intense energy generally reserved for the artist's major canvases, Ohne Titel (9.4.86) is among the most ambitious works on paper in Richter's oeuvre in terms of both scale and execution. An important painting from a series of eight, created on eight consecutive days from 2 April though 9 April 1986, Ohne Titel (9.4.86) combines Richter's techniques of spreading pigment across the surface of the paper with vivid hand-painted brushstrokes, setting up a formal dialogue between mechanical process and the artist's hand.

Simultaneously discordant and yet skillfully balanced, Ohne Titel (9.4.86)'s combination of primary colors is a dizzying array of one of Richter's most confident and euphoric color palettes. Drawing closely to the masters of the German Renaissance, as Stephen Edlis has suggested, Richter's red, blue, and yellow canvases contained the "luminous, acid color of Drer, Altdorfer and Grnewald" (S. Edlis, quoted in R. Storr eds., Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 71). A master colorist, as Camille Morineau has noted, the works of the 1980s "can seem to take an entirely different course because it can appear that Richter uses color randomly with unplanned combinations, but in fact, these ideas of combination and separation continue, albeit in different ways" (C. Morineau, "The Blow-Up, Primary Colours and Duplications," M. Godfrey & N. Serota (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, p. 129).

Richter's characteristic technique of building his abstractions by the thick application, as well as partial erasure of paint layers, has become a metaphor for the artist's evaluation of nature's cycle of creation and destruction. This idea is enhanced through the intensity of Richter's vibrant color palette. According to Richter, his abstract works are models and metaphors, "pictures that are about a possibility of social coexistence". He states: "Looked at in this way, all that I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom" (G. Richter as quoted in B. Buchloh, 1986, Richter; Text, Schriften und Interviews, Frankfurt, 1993).