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Lot Essay
'Within Richter’s oeuvre, the grey and the red-blue-yellow inpaintings, the color charts, and the grey monochromes of 1972 to 1976 should be viewed as a conceptual unit. They are much more sophisticated than the nonrepresentational works of the late 1960s – technically proficient, high-quality aesthetic formulations of that which can be neither seen nor illustrated’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 221).
‘Grey is a colour – and sometimes, to me, the most important of all’ (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 61).
'My grey monochromes have the same illusionistic implications as my landscapes. I want them to be seen as narratives – even if they are narratives of nothingness. Nothing is something. You might say they are like photographs of nothing’ (G. Richter, quoted in M. Kimmelman, ‘Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms’, in The New York Times, 27 January 2002).
Demonstrating the materiality of its own surface, Grau (Grey) (366-2) sits within a critical series of fully monochrome grey paintings that mark a turning point in Gerhard Richter’s art. Situated between his photorealist paintings of the early 1960s and his freely improvised coloured abstractions first developed in the 1970s, the grey monochromes were a fundamental step in Richter’s investigations into reality and representation. Painted in 1974, Grau stands as an example of Richter’s investigations into the role of colour and form in painting through monochrome, a conception which he had initially engaged with in his Colour Charts in the late 1960s. By using the colour grey, Richter was hoping to make ‘no statement whatever’, as for him the colour ‘evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make “nothing” visible... But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, H. Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83). At the end of 1974 Richter showed thirty-one of his grey paintings, including Grau (Grey) (366-2) in a major exhibition at the Städtisches Museum in Mönchengladbach. A companion work, Grau (Grey) (366-3) is currently held in the Kunstmuseum, Bonn.
Given Richter’s statement on the colour’s ability to operate in a similar way to photography in terms of accurately portraying reality, it is no surprise that his grey monochromes follow on directly from his photo-realist paintings, or could even be considered an extension of them. Having first covered a photorealist image with swirls of grey pigment in his early work Table (Tisch), 1962, it was in 1968 when Richter began to fully experiment with grey for the purposes of abstraction, painting over canvases and dissolving the figurative into the monochrome in a manner which recalled his grey-scale colour charts from 1966. Of this period Richter said ‘When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over...I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive statement; it became relative perfection, beauty, and therefore painting’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, in H. Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 82).
This pure expanse of grey with its lustrous graphite tone offers a surface that is at once monochromatically flat and unfathomably deep, a surface paradoxically rich in intention and engagement in spite of its ostensible uniformity. It is on closer inspection of the surface that nuances become apparent: what seems at first to be a monochromatic expanse bereft of the artist’s hand is in fact teeming with surface intrigue that captivates the eye, encouraging it to rove and revel in the image offered. As Dietmar Elger has observed, ‘it is precisely in this stripping away of artistry that the painterly qualities achieve a lasting effect’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 209). In these paintings, Richter has managed to deconstruct and then reconstruct the entire nature of picture-making, and to do so by embracing the deliberately inscrutable grey, elevating it, finding within its apparent limitations a wealth of signification and opportunity. After all, ‘Grey is a colour – and sometimes, to me, the most important of all’ (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 61).
Within a very short time, Richter had perceived the incredible variety and potential that existed within the grey monochromes as fully formed artworks in their own right: their nihilistic origins had been transcended as the original destructive act had resulted in a lush abstract painting. Grau perfectly encapsulates the incredible balance between inscrutability and sensuality that underpins the greatest of Richter’s ‘Grey’ paintings, and indeed his greatest works. From a distance, Grau might be mistaken as a conceptual cousin of the IKBs of Yves Klein or the Achromes of Piero Manzoni, as well as the Minimal aesthetic that had recently come to the fore. ‘The grey pictures were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere,’ Richter has explained. ‘I painted them nonetheless... I thought I had every right to do it because I was doing it for a different reason, because the paintings have something different to say and also look different’ (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 178).
‘Grey is a colour – and sometimes, to me, the most important of all’ (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 61).
'My grey monochromes have the same illusionistic implications as my landscapes. I want them to be seen as narratives – even if they are narratives of nothingness. Nothing is something. You might say they are like photographs of nothing’ (G. Richter, quoted in M. Kimmelman, ‘Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms’, in The New York Times, 27 January 2002).
Demonstrating the materiality of its own surface, Grau (Grey) (366-2) sits within a critical series of fully monochrome grey paintings that mark a turning point in Gerhard Richter’s art. Situated between his photorealist paintings of the early 1960s and his freely improvised coloured abstractions first developed in the 1970s, the grey monochromes were a fundamental step in Richter’s investigations into reality and representation. Painted in 1974, Grau stands as an example of Richter’s investigations into the role of colour and form in painting through monochrome, a conception which he had initially engaged with in his Colour Charts in the late 1960s. By using the colour grey, Richter was hoping to make ‘no statement whatever’, as for him the colour ‘evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make “nothing” visible... But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, H. Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82-83). At the end of 1974 Richter showed thirty-one of his grey paintings, including Grau (Grey) (366-2) in a major exhibition at the Städtisches Museum in Mönchengladbach. A companion work, Grau (Grey) (366-3) is currently held in the Kunstmuseum, Bonn.
Given Richter’s statement on the colour’s ability to operate in a similar way to photography in terms of accurately portraying reality, it is no surprise that his grey monochromes follow on directly from his photo-realist paintings, or could even be considered an extension of them. Having first covered a photorealist image with swirls of grey pigment in his early work Table (Tisch), 1962, it was in 1968 when Richter began to fully experiment with grey for the purposes of abstraction, painting over canvases and dissolving the figurative into the monochrome in a manner which recalled his grey-scale colour charts from 1966. Of this period Richter said ‘When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over...I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive statement; it became relative perfection, beauty, and therefore painting’ (G. Richter, quoted in ‘Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975’, in H. Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 82).
This pure expanse of grey with its lustrous graphite tone offers a surface that is at once monochromatically flat and unfathomably deep, a surface paradoxically rich in intention and engagement in spite of its ostensible uniformity. It is on closer inspection of the surface that nuances become apparent: what seems at first to be a monochromatic expanse bereft of the artist’s hand is in fact teeming with surface intrigue that captivates the eye, encouraging it to rove and revel in the image offered. As Dietmar Elger has observed, ‘it is precisely in this stripping away of artistry that the painterly qualities achieve a lasting effect’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. 209). In these paintings, Richter has managed to deconstruct and then reconstruct the entire nature of picture-making, and to do so by embracing the deliberately inscrutable grey, elevating it, finding within its apparent limitations a wealth of signification and opportunity. After all, ‘Grey is a colour – and sometimes, to me, the most important of all’ (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 61).
Within a very short time, Richter had perceived the incredible variety and potential that existed within the grey monochromes as fully formed artworks in their own right: their nihilistic origins had been transcended as the original destructive act had resulted in a lush abstract painting. Grau perfectly encapsulates the incredible balance between inscrutability and sensuality that underpins the greatest of Richter’s ‘Grey’ paintings, and indeed his greatest works. From a distance, Grau might be mistaken as a conceptual cousin of the IKBs of Yves Klein or the Achromes of Piero Manzoni, as well as the Minimal aesthetic that had recently come to the fore. ‘The grey pictures were done at a time when there were monochrome paintings everywhere,’ Richter has explained. ‘I painted them nonetheless... I thought I had every right to do it because I was doing it for a different reason, because the paintings have something different to say and also look different’ (G. Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 178).