Gerhard Richter

Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich
Galerie Bernd Lutze, Friedrichshafen
Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 10 December 1997, Lot 38
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Friedrichshafen, Galerie Bernd Lutze, Gerhard Richter 1968-1988, 1988

Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 643-5, illustrated in colour

 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the reds are slightly deeper and richer in the original. There are more mint green tones along the lower right edge in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Examined under ultraviolet light there is a very small spot of restoration to the extreme tip of the top right corner.
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"If I paint an abstract picture . . . I neither know in advance what it is supposed to look like nor where I intend to go when I am painting"  Gerhard Richter in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Gerhard Richter, 1991, p. 116

Exhibiting a kaleidoscope of colours, Gerhard Richter's sublime Untitled, 1987 is a striking work emerging from his dynamic and revolutionary series of Abstract Paintings that the artist focused on since the early 1980s.  The various seeping layers of brilliantly charged rainbow-coloured hues trickle across the canvas, coalescing in an attempt to defy conventional colour patterns.  Executed in multiple streaking layers of lustrous oil paint, the dominating colour in this composition is red – a colour synonymous with intense emotion such as passion, anger, fear and lust.  Richter embraced both colour and the manipulation of his paint to create the beautiful polychromatic expanse that is Untitled.  The intense colouristic harmony and lyrical resonance of Untitled permeates an atmosphere of density, chaos and romance. The interplay of tones and the complex layering of thick impasto are deliberately ambiguous, seeming both to reveal and conceal at the same time: the viewer is invited to look both at and through the laminas of material due to the hues being simultaneously unveiled and hidden.

The result of Richter's phenomenal technical aptitude has led to his reputation as one of the outstanding painters of our era, and this work is testament both to his ceaseless technical explorations in the field of Abstraction and to the painterly and intellectual elasticity unique in his work.  Untitled is the most manifest expression of Richter's intensive skill as a colourist and on this basis it is difficult to imagine an artist greater than him in this discipline in modern art history. Choosing a panoply of startling reds, vibrant yellows, and glowing mint green, the surface of this painting is regularly interrupted at intervals to reveal tantalising glimpses of electric blue, tangerine orange and an array of practically inconceivable colours.  Although spontaneous in their lyrical grandeur, this orchestra of overlaid marks are in fact carefully orchestrated, built up in powerful sweeps of thick impasto. Their colours seem to glide across the painting and enshroud the background in a beautiful atmosphere of trompe l'oeil which lends the painting an intriguing sense of depth. Additionally, this creates the impression of a three dimensional plane between the viewer and the picture ground which lies beneath.  The relationship of the flat surface of this painting with its intensely harmonious colouring with the painterly gestures and the shapes beneath is intentionally never quite certain or mappable. The diversity of Richter's approaches within this single canvas reveals the tension between his physical enjoyment of paint on the one hand and his intellectual analysis of it on the other. For Richter, the art of painting is both a deeply problematic and moral obligation.  Aside from being a compulsive channel for personal expression, it is a means for him to explore the easily overlooked concepts of perception, ideology and belief through which we construct the world surrounding us. Like his photo-based paintings which underline the role of pictures in understanding the fictive nature of reality, his abstract paintings similarly avoid and confront problems of representation simultaneously.

This objective approach to assembling Untitled is mirrored in his scientific interest in exploring the evocation of emotion in the viewer. Although constructed to remain devoid of any explicit meaning, the medley of colours and techniques act as subliminal triggers for emotional responses, revealing an innate colourist sensitivity. Despite their appearance, the reds, blues, yellows and greens have not been juxtaposed with chance, frenetic gesture but with the artful analysis of what emotional response these juxtapositions would provoke. This degree of control echoes the subtle manipulation of his photo-paintings, which although based around an arbitrary, found source images were frequently enhanced to affect their compulsive appeal to the viewer.  During the 1960s, alongside his early Photo-based paintings, he had developed other, increasingly abstract modes for the examination of visual perception. The Cityscapes, the mirrors, the Grey paintings and Colour Charts – all of these represented different examinations of the mechanics of painting, each precariously balanced on the line conventionally separating abstract and figurative modes of expression. In Untitled, Richter controls his composition though careful juxtaposition of colour and form, and deconstructs the process of painting to expose the false illusions underlying the notion of the artist as alchemist.

Richter initially confronted abstract painting when he executed a group of vivacious and colourful sketches in 1976, and thus this work stems from well over a decade of his investigation of various technical and aesthetic abstract possibilities. Richter's working practice for his Abstract Paintings has been described as remarkably methodical: he begins by placing a number of white primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several of them simultaneously and reworking them until they are completely harmonized. Tracts of colour are dragged across the canvas using a squeegee, so that the various strains of malleable, semi-liquid pigment suspended in oil are fused together and smudged first into the canvas, and then layered on top of each other as the paint strata accumulate. The painting undergoes multiple variations in which each new accretion brings colour and textural juxtapositions until they are completed. This process necessitates a lengthy production as the role of time obviates the dominance of a single creative identity: Richter's abstract works become truly the summation of a creative journey, trapping in their layers the shadows of wrought experience.

When Richter turned to painting his Abstract Paintings, he looked in detail at the history of abstraction. Not as a homage seeking to emulate abstract compositions in the manner of the Abstract Expressionists or the Ecole de Paris artists but rather to challenge the very form and relevance of their painterly vocabulary within the wider forum of the of the science of representation. Taking the pillars of abstraction - colour, gesture and form – and exploring them as formal rather than spiritual elements, he employed them in a more knowing Post Modern manner; one that was fully attentive to their evocative capacity and associative meanings. In much the same way that Roy Lichtenstein had taken the 'theory of the Brushstroke', isolated it and re-presented it to the point whereby it no longer represented an expressionist gesture but a carefully studied, subjective motif in itself, Richter too in his abstract paintings was quoting from his predecessors while demystifying paint's spiritual allusions and accentuating its material nature.