Evoking an image of a half-dreamt almost otherworldly landscape of shimmering grey and intense blue skies, underlined with shades of purple and delicate greens creating dark horizons, this series of Abstrakte Skizzen (Abstract Sketches), are a masterful exploration of the interactions between the raw materials of painting and the illusionistic space. In the late 1970s, Richter began to create abstract paintings, which he describes as “fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate”. In Richter’s work the painting sets the parameters of its own reality. Richter says he doesn't know reality, he just knows what impressions he has of reality. Impressions are always changing as the appearance of reality is always changing. His reality is paint and the different ways he can manipulate it. As the artist puts it, “later you realise that you can’t represent reality at all – that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality” (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Rolf Schön, in: Ibid., p. 59).

Hailing from the artist’s 749 series, the present works are from a series of originally 12 abstract sketches executed in 1991. The first four iterations of this series (see fig. 1-4) are in the collection of the Museum Frieder Burda. Bühler Höhe (fig. 1), begins by depicting a more realistic landscape that shows a blurred, dreamlike view of a hillside behind trees looking towards a village. Then gradually in the continuous works of this series, Richter concentrates more and more on the actual brushstrokes and the impasto nature of the paint, his attention moves to the reality of the paint rather than what you think you can recognise in the image. The path from the representational depiction of a tree to the abstract colour sketch can be traced, the more Richter blurs the trees, the more the brush and the paint come to the foreground and the initial landscape disappears. The present works represent the remaining pure impressions of the initial reality and illustrate the fascinating observation of Richter’s working process.

Throughout his oeuvre, Richter’s extraordinary articulation of nature is reminiscent to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German Romantic landscapes, and in particular, Caspar David Fredrich’s allegorical panoramas featuring the colossal scale and metaphysical dimension of nature. This present series exemplifies that Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings stand as the pinnacle of his career, during which he has undoubtedly searched for the limits of representation, nature of perception and the operations of visual cognition.