格哈德·里希特

Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1985 

Munich, Galerie Fred Jahn, Gerhard Richter – Abstrakte Bilder, 1985

Jürgen Harten, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Bilder 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, p. 331, no. 578-3, illustrated

Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, n.p., no. 578-3. illustrated in colour

Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné 1976-1987, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 2013, p. 460, no. 578-3, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Abstraktes Bild narrates a compelling moment of conceptual transition for Gerhard Richter. Between 1980 and 1986 Richter principally devoted his practice to the creation of abstract paintings in which primary and secondary colour utterly dominates the picture plane. In these works Richter tempered apparent gestural abandon with logical calculation. Although contemporary to, and in some ways superficially aligned with, the school of Neo-Expressionism emerging in Germany during the late 1970s and 80s, Richter’s arrival at abstraction was the result of an utterly singular and remarkably methodical inquiry. On the cusp of his full espousal of the squeegee as the decisive painterly tool, Abstraktes Bild  from 1985 recounts Richter’s movement away from an experimentation with anti-painting – as defined by the Farben (Colour Charts) and Grau (Grey Paintings) – and into the realm of totally free abstraction.

The present work sits within a sequence of five paintings articulated in identical dimensions and designated 578 within the artist’s highly systematic production. As a group these works are linked by a mutuality of colour palette and formal treatment. Geometric fields of colour are juxtaposed with paroxysmal yet purposeful marks, whilst daubed gradation is met with scraped veils of diaphanous colour. These are complex works in which the suggestion of space is created via the interaction and overlaying of soft diffusive marks, geometric shapes and free-hand strokes. Alongside these contrasting brushstrokes and juxtaposition of primary colour, the structural presence of grey and black tubular passages in these early abstracts prompts intriguing connections with other facets of Richter’s mid-1980s practice. In the present painting, a grey vertical scaffold is accompanied by shorter bands of tight monochrome shading that punctuate the yellow field on the right-hand side. Intriguingly, these formal columnar elements relate directly to tenets central to both Richter’s contemporary photorealist works and his opus of grey-scale paintings created during the mid-1960s.

In 1982, Richter began to focus on the landmark series of Kerzen (Candles). Inciting a dialogue with traditional Dutch vanitas still-lifes, these photo-paintings ostensibly appear as the binary opposite to Richter’s simultaneous abstract inquiry. However, it is only following the production of these referential works that the black and grey candle-like tubular columns begin to emerge in the Abstrakte Bilder. Significantly, and as evident within both the Kerzen and the present painting, these structural forms most resemble and correlate to the earlier Vorhang (Curtains), Rӧhren (Tubes), and Wellblech (Corrugated Iron) executed between 1964 and 1967. In these works monochromatic bars and pleated structures – some with no visual referent (Wellblech and Rӧhren) and others based on photographs (Vorhang) – populate the picture plane. In both the Abstrakte Bilder and Kerzen, two bodies of work created almost twenty years later, we see Richter re-examining this early inquiry. As curator Camille Morineau explains: “In the 1980s he had returned to these ideas, very possibly prompted by the Candle Series, whose forms may have reminded him of the 1960s works… Resembling scaffolding, all these columns and tubes provide an architecture against which Richter could spar with other parts of the painting. But what makes them strange is the way they appear like blown-up images of pipes, and the way they suggest the illusion of three-dimensional space, an illusion undercut elsewhere in the paintings by very flat marks like those of the squeegee” (Camille Morineau, ‘The Blow-Up, Primary Colours and Duplications’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, (and travelling), Gerhard Richter: Panorama, 2011, p. 129). Though the combination of different types of brushstroke creates an illusion of spontaneity, the impression of gesticular abandon is belied by cold calculation. Carefully determined and scrutinised, these paintings were not created through random accumulation, but are instead the product of working through thoughtful juxtapositions in which elements are placed next to and react against each other.

During the mid-1970s, Richter made a series of paintings from photographs depicting thickly applied oil paint and smaller painted brushstrokes. Monumentally blown up and depicted with photorealist veracity, these zoomed in details took on the appearance of Abstract Expressionist paintings. From this moment on Richter had found the logic through which the figurative could be made abstract; a transformation that when reversed validated a form of free-painting in which abstraction could be understood as figurative, and thus in many ways photographic. The works from the 1980s continue with this logic and laid the ground work for the ensuing abstract paintings post-1986 in which Richter began to layer accumulations of pigment and determine formal discord and resolution using the squeegee alone. Heterogeneous and complex, the present work is testament to Gerhard Richter’s early body of Abstrakte Bilder in which the artist pioneered a collapse of the photographic and the painterly.