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拍品专文
‘My small abstract paintings... allowed me to do what I had never let myself do; put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me.’
–Gerhard Richter
‘When I paint an Abstraktes Bild, I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings’
–Gerhard Richter
With its deliquescent palette and cascading, patterned textures, Abstraktes Bild, 1990, presents a hypnotic vision from a burgeoning moment in Gerhard Richter’s practice. The painting offers exactly what its title implies: a mesmeric sweeping of purely abstract colour and form. For Richter, the small scale of the work provides great scope for uncovering and discovering the visceral and emotive capabilities of abstract art. ‘My small abstract paintings,’ he has stated, ‘allowed me to do what I had never let myself do; put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me’ (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Text, London, 2009, p. 256). Indeed, in Abstraktes Bild, Richter’s proverbial door is flung wide open as the work’s elaborate surface erupts with gestural strokes of paint. A stretch of sea-green washes over a white primed canvas; glistening bands of colour emerge in crevices of paint, tumbling in jewel-like tones of emerald, ruby, amber and jade; slabs of orange are spread horizontally across its façade, exposing hints and glints of kaleidoscopic hues in their wake. Scattered atop the surface are splatterings of paint in royal blue and velvet black, splayed and sprayed as if in a rhythmic dance. Using the squeegee – his signature tool since the 1980s – Richter builds shimmering layers of paint, guiding his pigment across the canvas in sweeping horizontal strokes. On top of this vibrant terrain, the artist carves thick vertical striations using the hard edge of a palette knife, disrupting, exposing and entangling the strata of paint beneath. In this work, rills of iridescent paint emerge in the top right and bottom left of the pictorial plane, creating flutters of colour. These are interspersed with broad apertures that reveal the work’s geological make-up. Like light refracted through a waterfall, veils of colour emerge and dissolve, colliding and intermingling with prismatic splendour. The contrasting textures create rich visual interest: moments of thick impasto flatten out into vast, smooth openings where thin paint, or bare canvas, is revealed.
During the early 1990s, this near-archaeological approach to the canvas became something of an obsession for Richter. As if driven by compulsion, Richter explained, ‘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’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1992’ in H-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 245). This dynamic – the promise of reality and its continual deflection – had always been at the heart of Richter’s practice: from his earliest photorealist paintings, whose immaculate painted artifice sought to undermine the authority ascribed to photography, to his embrace of the squeegee, whose ruptures and apertures induced the sense of a long-lost figurative reality hovering beyond the work’s abstract surface. As we dig deeper, we are increasingly drawn into the unknown. ‘With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood’, Richter once claimed (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). An early example of his opulently textured paintings for which he is world-renowned, Abstraktes Bild is an exquisite demonstration of this majestic visual complexity.
–Gerhard Richter
‘When I paint an Abstraktes Bild, I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings’
–Gerhard Richter
With its deliquescent palette and cascading, patterned textures, Abstraktes Bild, 1990, presents a hypnotic vision from a burgeoning moment in Gerhard Richter’s practice. The painting offers exactly what its title implies: a mesmeric sweeping of purely abstract colour and form. For Richter, the small scale of the work provides great scope for uncovering and discovering the visceral and emotive capabilities of abstract art. ‘My small abstract paintings,’ he has stated, ‘allowed me to do what I had never let myself do; put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me’ (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Text, London, 2009, p. 256). Indeed, in Abstraktes Bild, Richter’s proverbial door is flung wide open as the work’s elaborate surface erupts with gestural strokes of paint. A stretch of sea-green washes over a white primed canvas; glistening bands of colour emerge in crevices of paint, tumbling in jewel-like tones of emerald, ruby, amber and jade; slabs of orange are spread horizontally across its façade, exposing hints and glints of kaleidoscopic hues in their wake. Scattered atop the surface are splatterings of paint in royal blue and velvet black, splayed and sprayed as if in a rhythmic dance. Using the squeegee – his signature tool since the 1980s – Richter builds shimmering layers of paint, guiding his pigment across the canvas in sweeping horizontal strokes. On top of this vibrant terrain, the artist carves thick vertical striations using the hard edge of a palette knife, disrupting, exposing and entangling the strata of paint beneath. In this work, rills of iridescent paint emerge in the top right and bottom left of the pictorial plane, creating flutters of colour. These are interspersed with broad apertures that reveal the work’s geological make-up. Like light refracted through a waterfall, veils of colour emerge and dissolve, colliding and intermingling with prismatic splendour. The contrasting textures create rich visual interest: moments of thick impasto flatten out into vast, smooth openings where thin paint, or bare canvas, is revealed.
During the early 1990s, this near-archaeological approach to the canvas became something of an obsession for Richter. As if driven by compulsion, Richter explained, ‘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’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1992’ in H-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 245). This dynamic – the promise of reality and its continual deflection – had always been at the heart of Richter’s practice: from his earliest photorealist paintings, whose immaculate painted artifice sought to undermine the authority ascribed to photography, to his embrace of the squeegee, whose ruptures and apertures induced the sense of a long-lost figurative reality hovering beyond the work’s abstract surface. As we dig deeper, we are increasingly drawn into the unknown. ‘With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood’, Richter once claimed (G. Richter quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1988, p. 107). An early example of his opulently textured paintings for which he is world-renowned, Abstraktes Bild is an exquisite demonstration of this majestic visual complexity.