Gerhard Richter

Denys Zacharopoulos, Paris (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Gerhard Richter: Painting, 1993
Bonn, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Gerhard Richter: Painting 1962-1993, 1993-1994
Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Gerhard Richter, 1994
Bignan, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Praxis, 1994
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Gerhard  Richter, 1994

Exhibition Catalogue, Düsseldorf, Stadtische Kunsthalle; Berlin, Nationalgalerie Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Bern, Kunsthalle; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst, Gerhard Richter Paintings 1962-1985, 1986, p. 333, no. 579-1, illustrated in colour
Angelika Thill et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, no. 579-1, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is more vibrant in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the rich texture of the surface apparent in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon very close inspection, there is extremely minor wear to the top right and lower corner tips. Close inspection reveals a few scattered very faint and stable hairline cracks in isolated places. There is a very short hairline crack to the green impasto paint 20cm. down from the top right hand corner on the right edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Masterfully orchestrated with vibrant hues of yellow, green and red through which underlays of dark pigment suspended in oil emerge and coalesce in an elegant corps a corps, this work appears as the evanescent landscape of a half-remembered dream. Demonstrating a powerful chromatic range of primaries dynamically swept across the picture plane, D.Z. is an early example of Gerhard Richter’s mature answer to the compositional challenges of abstraction.
Richter’s oeuvre is characterized by the herculean feat of challenging the medium that is the most established, aristocratic and weighed down by tradition: oil on canvas. His restless investigation into the matters of perception is conducted with such an extraordinary and seemingly limitless freedom despite its self-imposed material parergon that it indisputably crowns him as the master of contemporary painting. Described by Hans-Jakob Brun as one of the “extremely few artists on whom the focus in continuous”, his unique virtuosity led him to a phenomenal success that never tires. (Exh. Cat., Oslo, Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter, the Art of the Impossible – Paintings 1964-1998, 1999, p. 6)

The artist’s homage to illustrious art historian and co-curator of the 48^th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX Denys Zacharopoulos, D.Z. encapsulates on an intimate scale typical of Richter’s works from the mid to late 1980s his remarkable grasp on the foundations of our visual understanding and cognition. After decades of conceptual enquiry, the current lot lies at the crossroad of a paradigm shift in the artist’s practice – which, given Richter’s position of “incontrovertible centrality” within the canon of contemporary Art History means an outstandingly rare flicker of premonition into the future of painting and visual culture itself. (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh quoted in Exh. Cat., Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Gerhard RichterLarge Abstracts, 2009, p. 9)

Over the past five decades, Richter’s practice has been driven towards the achievement of a single agenda: to find a middle ground in the dialectic between figuration and abstraction. In the corpus of his abstract works, this ambition evolved to find its resolution throughout strategies of ordered chance. Richter’s earliest experiments with complete abstraction verged either towards a cooler and systematic technique concealing evidence of the artist’s hand, which echoed a more geometric or minimalist type of abstraction such as Piet Mondrian’s or Barnett Newman’s, or on the contrary displayed spontaneous and thickly impastoed painterly gestures reminiscent of Jackson Pollock and Art Informel. These experiments conducted within the furthest recesses of abstraction resulted in the 1980s in his most celebrated body of work, the epic and ongoing Abstraktes Bilder – of which the present painting is one of the very first epitomic examples.  D.Z.’s bold primary colours and sweeping layers of yellow paint tracked across the canvas by the squeegee are combined with organic and seemingly finger-painted red, bluish-grey and black accretions in a cross-like pattern. This makes of D.Z. an extraordinarily literal application of Richter’s career-defining paradoxical blend of the mechanical and the bodily, simultaneously revealing and concealing the artist’s presence.

The apotheosis of Richter’s oeuvre, the Abstraktes Bilder cross the perennial conceptual bridge between figuration and abstraction and declare it obsolete: all of Gerhard Richter’s paintings are pictures, as the abstracts evoke unrepresentable yet familiar images in the collective consciousness. Furthermore, the Abstraktes Bilder render void the primal dichotomy operated between order and chaos by bringing into form pictures that are not predetermined by the artist but whose production rely equally on spontaneous inspiration and the arbitrary accretions created by the squeegee - and D.Z. is the most fully resolved work up until that period to display evidence of Richter’s mastery of this hard-edged spatula which earned Richter early critical acclaim and later on a weight of almost canonical authority.