Grün-Blau-Rot (Green-Blue-Red)

Part of a series painted especially for Parkett magazine’s 1993 special edition on Gerhard Richter, Grün-Blau-Rot (Green-Blue-Red) is a sumptuous study in the artist’s famed abstract technique. Applying green, blue and red paint directly from the tube to the canvas, he pulled the pigments across the canvas using a squeegee, a signature method developed during the 1980s: as a result of the squeegee’s pull, the colours fracture, glow, and merge, creating a flickering, neon jewel of a painting. With its electric red spilling over a blaze of green to melt into dramatic, ink-dark blue, this is a work overtly concerned with the interactions of colour. While the majority of Richter’s abstract works are simply entitled Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), deliberately attempting to strip away any connotations for the viewer, in Grün-Blau-Rot the artist uses his title to draw our attention to the three simple colours that come together, in infinite variety, across the series. As Robert Storr has said of Richter, ‘it is hard to think of him as anything other than one of the great colourists of late twentieth-century painting’ (R. Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting, New York 2003, p. 112).

Widely recognised as one of the most important periods in his abstract practice, the early 1990s were a time of great professional triumph for Richter. His first landmark retrospective in the United Kingdom was held at Tate Gallery, London in 1991; the following year, he presented work at Documenta IX, Kassel. In 1993, the year of Grün-Blau-Rot, a critically-acclaimed touring retrospective travelled from Paris to Bonn, Stockholm and Madrid, and a new catalogue raisonné was published in conjunction with the show. Throughout this international attention, abstract painting retained its visual and intellectual appeal for Richter. In the Grün-Blau-Rot paintings, we see him exploring and experimenting with colour relationships to potent effect, creating an aurora borealis of hues from just three initial components. Mirroring the red-green-blue model used to theorise colour perception since the nineteenth century, the works present a distilled, essentialised chromatic vision; Richter’s squeegee technique serves to disassociate an invasive artistic consciousness from the work itself, allowing the colours to speak for themselves. In the endless splendour of these colours, dancing at the border between chance and control, Richter reaches for some fundamental truth about the visible world. ‘It is a good technique for switching off thinking’ the artist says. ‘Consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice “between” state’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, ‘Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei’, in Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20).