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拍品专文
‘Grey is a colour – and sometimes, to me, the most important of all’
–Gerhard Richter
Dating from one of the most important exploratory periods in Gerhard Richter’s practice, Ohne Titel (Untitled) elegantly encapsulates the dialogue between photorealism and abstraction that lies at the heart of his oeuvre. Created in 1970 – the year after his first institutional solo exhibition – the work combines the blurred greyscale depths of his early photo-paintings with the mottled non-representational painterly surfaces that would come to define his very first Abstraktes Bilder, initiated later that decade. Operating in chromatic counterpoint to the Colour Charts and Red-Blue-Yellow paintings that Richter began to produce during this period, the present work’s palette anticipates the pivotal series of Grey monochromes that would occupy the artist between 1973 and 1976. Unlike these works, however, whose surfaces were by and large non-variegated, the present work retains a certain degree of gestural fluidity, aligning it with the indeterminate Cloudscapes, Seascapes and Inpaintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hints of known realities flicker within its depths, only to dissolve moments later into a formless haze. It is a vision of the space between the poles that define our perception of the world: abstraction and figuration, black and white. Over the next four decades, Richter would pursue an extended enquiry into this inarticulate zone, rigorously challenging art’s long-established binaries through a series of technical and conceptual painterly experiments. The present work was one of nine from across his career – four of which are now held in museums worldwide – selected for the 1993-94 group exhibition Art from Germany: A Winter’s Tale at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.
In his first catalogued painting – a 1962 canvas entitled Tisch – Richter set out the parameters of his investigation. In this now-iconic work, the artist deliberately obfuscated a black and white photorealist painting of a table, overwriting its form with haptic swirls of pigment. Tonality and form, the work proposed, were not absolutes, but rather points on an infinite spectrum. Photography and painting were similarly conceived, stripped of their binary opposition and reconfigured as two sides of the same coin. In a post-war world that had lost all faith in art’s romantic power, Richter sought to drill down to its very core, obliterating its hierarchies and neutralizing its loaded mythologies. For the artist, it was grey – more than any other chromatic value – that embodied the spirit of this enquiry. ‘It makes no statement whatever’, he explained; ‘it 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, letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975, reproduced in D. Elger and H-U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text, London 2009, p. 92). Situated at a pivotal point on the road from figuration to abstraction – from form to illusion, from colour to non-colour – the present work occupies important territory in Richter’s early practice.
–Gerhard Richter
Dating from one of the most important exploratory periods in Gerhard Richter’s practice, Ohne Titel (Untitled) elegantly encapsulates the dialogue between photorealism and abstraction that lies at the heart of his oeuvre. Created in 1970 – the year after his first institutional solo exhibition – the work combines the blurred greyscale depths of his early photo-paintings with the mottled non-representational painterly surfaces that would come to define his very first Abstraktes Bilder, initiated later that decade. Operating in chromatic counterpoint to the Colour Charts and Red-Blue-Yellow paintings that Richter began to produce during this period, the present work’s palette anticipates the pivotal series of Grey monochromes that would occupy the artist between 1973 and 1976. Unlike these works, however, whose surfaces were by and large non-variegated, the present work retains a certain degree of gestural fluidity, aligning it with the indeterminate Cloudscapes, Seascapes and Inpaintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hints of known realities flicker within its depths, only to dissolve moments later into a formless haze. It is a vision of the space between the poles that define our perception of the world: abstraction and figuration, black and white. Over the next four decades, Richter would pursue an extended enquiry into this inarticulate zone, rigorously challenging art’s long-established binaries through a series of technical and conceptual painterly experiments. The present work was one of nine from across his career – four of which are now held in museums worldwide – selected for the 1993-94 group exhibition Art from Germany: A Winter’s Tale at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.
In his first catalogued painting – a 1962 canvas entitled Tisch – Richter set out the parameters of his investigation. In this now-iconic work, the artist deliberately obfuscated a black and white photorealist painting of a table, overwriting its form with haptic swirls of pigment. Tonality and form, the work proposed, were not absolutes, but rather points on an infinite spectrum. Photography and painting were similarly conceived, stripped of their binary opposition and reconfigured as two sides of the same coin. In a post-war world that had lost all faith in art’s romantic power, Richter sought to drill down to its very core, obliterating its hierarchies and neutralizing its loaded mythologies. For the artist, it was grey – more than any other chromatic value – that embodied the spirit of this enquiry. ‘It makes no statement whatever’, he explained; ‘it 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, letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975, reproduced in D. Elger and H-U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text, London 2009, p. 92). Situated at a pivotal point on the road from figuration to abstraction – from form to illusion, from colour to non-colour – the present work occupies important territory in Richter’s early practice.