格哈德·里希特 | 《無題（19.3.86）》

弗雷德·雅恩畫廊，慕尼黑
藝術之家，米蘭
私人收藏，意大利（1989年購自上述機構）
倫敦佳士得，2012年2月15日，拍品編號249（經由上述藏家委託）
娜塔莉·塞魯西畫廊，巴黎
現藏家購自上述畫廊

阿姆斯特丹，全荷蘭博物館，〈里希特：紙本作品1983-1986年〉，1987年2月-4月，頁碼不詳，載圖

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Deploying an exuberance of colour in which gestural abandon is tempered by logical calculation, Gerhard Richter’s Untitled (19.3.86) distils the artist’s seminal abstract practice. Vibrating with staccato veils of stuttering paint arranged in swathes of red, green, and yellow tones, the present work demonstrates spectacular force and sensitivity in a seductive painterly synthesis that is visually aligned to a strikingly atmospheric evocation. Sitting at the cusp of the artist’s full espousal of the squeegee as his principal painterly tool, Untitled (19.3.86) forms part of a suite of 6 works on paper each created on a specific day between 16 and 21 March 1986. Particularly dense in composition, the present work is arguably the most painterly from this suite. Within his wider oeuvre, Richter’s abstract works on paper are markedly rare. As powerfully demonstrated in the present work, this medium expresses the artist’s most radical instances of experimentation, expressing investigative urges that would later find their way into his works on canvas. It is thus in this more intimate medium that Richter finds the freedom to fully employ a unique painterly vocabulary, giving unparalleled insight into the material process and aesthetic volition of an artist at the height of his abstract prowess.

Since the late 1960s, abstraction has formed a conceptual keystone through which Richter has radically explored the compositional and chromatic possibilities of the painted medium. During the mid-1970s, Richter embarked on a series of paintings based on photographs depicting thickly applied oil paint and smaller painted brushstrokes. Monumentally blown up and executed 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. In the first half of the 1980s, Richter became increasingly prolific in his abstract paintings. Initially indulging in a myriad of free floating and delineated abstract shapes, these works would lay the foundation for the ensuing abstract paintings that would come to define the period post-1986, in which Richter began to layer accumulations of pigment and determine formal discord and resolution using the squeegee alone. The present work thus stands at an important turning point in the artist’s oeuvre. It is already here that we can fully detect a movement away from planned compositional elements and towards the element of chance as implicated by the rubber squeegee.

In its fervent celebration of colour, Untitled (19.3.86) is a revelation of boundless chromatic affect that is further compounded by the raw paper medium. Reflecting on Richter’s abstract practice, Benjamin Buchloh writes: “[I]f the ability of colour to generate this emotional, spiritual quality is presented and at the same time negated at all points, surely it's always cancelling itself out. With so many combinations, so many permutational relationships, there can’t be any harmonious chromatic order, or compositional either, because there are no ordered relations left either in the colour system or the spatial system” (Benjamin Buchloh, ‘An Interview with Gerhard Richter’ (1986) in: Benjamin Buchloh, Ed., Gerhard Richter: October Files, Massachusetts 2009, pp. 23-24). It is in this redefinition of compositional order that Richter evokes a mesmerising polyphony of colour, texture, and perspective. In Untitled (19.3.86) the phenomenological capacity of painting is presented as a dichotomy between the squeegee and the brush; a trajectory that would come to monumental fruition in his paintings on canvas of the following years.