Gerhard Richter

Thomas Borgmann Gallery, Cologne
Alexander Fehr, Cologne
Anthony Meier Fine Art, San Francisco
Massimo Martino Fine Arts & Projects, Lugano
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Junge deutsche Künstler. 14 x 14, 1968
Nurenberg, Kunsthalle, 16. Ausstellung Deutscher Kunstlerbund, 1968
Vienna, Kunsthalle, Alpenblick, 1998, p. 184, illustrated
Porto, Fundacion Serralves, Circa 1968, 1999, p. 371, illustrated in colour

Jürgen Harten, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, p. 77, no. 183, illustrated
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 183, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer and the whites are warmer in tone in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to convey the texture of the brushwork in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are faint handling marks toward the top right corner, to the centre left edge and along the bottom centre edge. There is minor rubbing to the bottom right corner and to the extreme tips of the lower left and upper right corners. There is a very faint horizontal rub mark and a few scattered transparent media accretions towards the lower right corner . No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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Thick with almost sculpted paint and epic in scale, Gebirge is a rare and classic example of the 'Mountain-scape' series which Richter developed in a brief period between 1967 and 1970. Within this small series, Richter created very few works on this scale and here the sheer size of the painting envelopes the viewer's vision. Standing back from Gebirge, this is an awe-inspiring, almost photo-realist, view of classic Alpine scenery. Step towards the painting, and suddenly the mode of construction becomes laid bare and the closer one goes, the more blurred and abstracted the image becomes until one reaches the canvas and all that can be seen is a mass of heavily applied black and white brushstrokes, with details accentuated in charcoal. Around the same time, Chuck Close had begun to develop his now legendary Super-Realist paintings, in which the perfection of the application of paint ensured that the paintings looked hyper-real from far away and retained that same convincing aura from close up. But Richter was not interested in replicating a photograph, he was more interested in a conceptual approach to picture making, in blurring the boundaries between the styles in an attempt to investigate the way we see. Here, he almost dissolves the subject matter in a fluid painterliness that pushes hard against the threshold between realism and abstraction, between the illusory and the concrete.

Both in their size and the physical presence of the paint, it can be said that the 'Montain-scapes' are the ultimate depiction of what it is both to look at and experience nature. In the powerful facture of these paintings, the artist's intervention is more palpable than in the 'Photo-Paintings', though rather than appearing as free expressive brushwork it remains bound up with the structure of the photographic images upon which they are based. Here in Gebirge, it is the stunningly photographic view which draws us in, but the fascinating layering of textured paint which involves us from close up. Jutting left and right the brushstrokes cut into the painterly surface. In much the same way as erosion cuts away at the rock's surface, Richter here adds paint to take it away. Furthermore, despite the relative density and weight of the paint which constructs this powerful physical image, every now and then, Richter leaves a trace of bare canvas to remind us that this is just a two-dimensional picture plane.

Throughout his life, Richter has gradually shown a stronger affinity towards the grand feats of nature which surround us. Neither devoutly Religious nor Romantic in style, he is nevertheless a passionate admirer of the paintings of the great German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich. However, where Friedrich always placed emphasis on heightened colour relations as a reflection of Divine being, Richter emptied any potential narrative from the composition in order to concentrate on the painterly construction. Presented across vast tableaux, these paintings were no longer about picturing human relationships within the painting but about creating them between the painting and the viewer.

The Alps with their grouping of masses, their morphology, and their size are impossible to assess from a distance. Their oblique surfaces and depths, shadowed holes and light clouds provide a fascinating basis for an investigation into the construction of the world which surrounds us as a metaphor for that which constructs a painting. However, although the free brushstrokes that build Gebirge would appear to have been enacted with the immediacy and emotion of a classic German Expressionist, somehow Richter manages to bind the calculated structure of the photographic image upon which the painting is based into the tapestry of the painting. This highly skilled combination of two directly oppositional approaches to this monumental canvas, makes Gebirge one of the first paintings in Richter's oeuvre to tackle the bigger questions which make him one of the most important artists working today.