Gerhard Richter

Exhibition Catalogue, Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, The Sublime Void, 1993, p. 40, illustrated in colour
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 743-4, illustrated in colour

When Gerhard Richter turned to gestural abstract painting in 1976, he did it vigorously and unapologetically in an environment highly mistrustful of expressionist qualities in picture-making.  Richter has since come to personify the genre of contemporary abstract painting.  A triumphant act of painting, Abstraktes Bild from 1991, epitomizes the mature achievement that is Richter's abstraction.  Contrary to the perceived impulsiveness conveyed by the gestural quality of its surface, the present work is derived from a systematic enterprise and is more in tune with the techniques of the old masters than to those of contemporary artists.  Trying to find precursors to this type of abstraction is practically impossible.  Richter has long talked of pivotal painters in the history of art and his continuing conflicts with their work.  With the present work and his other paintings from the early 1990s, Richter was now prepared to entertain the idea that the sentiments abstraction awakens need not be judged on logical grounds, but rather on their psychological resonance.  Abstraction can not claim to embody the absolute as it did for Kandinsky, Melevich, Mondrian, or to the Abstract Expressionists, but it can lend substance to otherwise elusive aspects about our makeup.

Richter initially confronted abstract painting when he executed a group of vivacious and colorful sketches in 1976, and the present 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.  First, Richter begins by placing a number of primed white canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several or all of them simultaneously.  A soft ground of red, yellow, blue, or green is then applied only to be subsequently altered by large strokes: tracks of color drawn out with a squeegee.  The painting undergoes multiple variations in which each new accretion brings color and textural juxtapositions that are reworked until they are completely harmonized.  In turn, the viewer is afforded the opportunity to penetrate the canvas while being absorbed by its vast surface area, a referent to the large scale format of both academic painting and the New York School. 

Abstraktes Bild, is amongst Richter's most vibrant abstract paintings from the early 1990s; tantalizing, it acts as a precursor to two major series of abstract paintings widely considered as masterpieces in the artist's oeuvre, the Bach suite of 1992-1993 housed in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the group of six paintings from 1998 titled Abstract Picture (Rhombus), housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  These works contain technical passages of virtuosity similarly found in the present work.  Abstraktes Bild, is characterized by a feeling of density, confusion and romance, but also intense colouristic harmony, lyrical and tonal resonances.  These myriad details compressed upon and beneath the painting's surface both reveal and undermine the perceptual depth of the painting.  The interplay of colors and the complex layering of the color are deliberately ambiguous, both seem to reveal and conceal at the same time.

Furthermore, Richter's technique affords an element of chance that is necessary to facilitate the artistic ideology of the abstract works.  As the artist has himself explained, "I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned.  This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture...I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself." (the artist interviewed in 1990 in: Hubertus Butin, Stefan Gronert, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Eds., Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965 – 2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 36)  Although constructed to remain devoid of any explicit meaning, the kaleidoscope of colors and techniques act as subliminal triggers for emotional responses, revealing an innate colouristic sensitivity.  Despite their appearance, the reds, greens, yellows and blues have not been juxtaposed with chance, frenetic gesture but with the artful analysis of what emotional response these juxtapositions would provoke.  In Abstraktes Bild, Richter is not bearing his soul, nor even offering a glimpse of it.  Rather, by controlling the composition though careful juxtaposition of color and form, he deconstructs the process of painting to expose the false illusions underlying the notion of the artist as alchemist or shaman; the painterly equivalent of revealing the puppeteer's invisible strings.