Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild 1977 Oil on canvas 42 x 40 cm. Framed. Signed and dated 'Richter, 77' and work number '431/4' verso on canvas. - Minor traces of age. Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol.3, 1976-1987, Ostfildern 2013, cat.rais. no.431-4 Gerhard Richter Online-Werkverzeichnis, Art, Paintings, Abstracts, Abstracts 1970–1979, Abstract Painting Provenance Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich; Galerie Bernd Lutze, Friedrichshafen (label verso); private collection, Tubingen; Lempertz, Cologne, 20.11.1992, lot 805; Galerie Heseler, Munich; private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia Exhibitions Friedrichshafen 1985/1986 (Galerie Bernd Lutze), Gerhard Richter, Abstrakte Bilder 1978-1984 (label verso); Friedrichshafen 1979 (Galerie Bernd Lutze), Gerhard Richter, Bilder und Druckgraphik, 1962-1978 (label verso) A radical upheaval in Gerhard Richter’s creativity takes place in the first abstract picture, created in 1976. The estrangement from overpaintings and grey pictures, with the radically objective lack of form, which, as he himself stated, had reached a creative dead end, brings something completely new with it. He confronts this coup with curiosity and by all means scepticism; tentatively, he begins to sound out the potential of the new possibilities, which ultimately prove to be infinitely fruitful. Up until 2017, Richter created abstract pictures which develop without repetition with a certain inner rigour along the artist’s personal biography, mirroring each of his sensitivities. He intends to compose little, to leave the picture to emerge freely and openly, i.e. autonomously. “The intention: invent nothing, no idea, no composition, no object, no form – and retain everything: composition, object, form, idea, picture […], and in contradiction to this, always the intention, the hope of receiving a subject all but as a gift, one that I did not invent and that would have to be more general, better, less useable, more universally valid.” (Gerhard Richter, quoted from: Dietmar Elger, Hans Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter. Text 1961 bis 2007, Cologne 2008, p.163f.). The work offered here is a rare example of this decisive time of transition. It is from a series of ten relatively small pictures that Richter painted in 1977 still entirely under the impression of the artistic, experimental new beginning in their diversity. The multi-layeredness that Richter practised in the Abstract Paintings from the beginning emerges particularly beautifully: gestural, spontaneously placed colour structures lie over a smooth first layer of paint, which give the diffuse impression of a softly drawn realistic detail due to the rubbing of the still wet oil paint. “And this smooth, merging surface is then firstly like a finished picture, which I understand after some time or have seen enough of, and in a following painting session partly destroy, partly amend, and so it continues with time intervals, until there is nothing more to be done, and so the picture is finished; that is then something that I understand in the same way as it then confronts me as something incomprehensible and independent”, wrote Richter himself about the process of the picture emergence (quoted in: Elger, Obrist, ibid, p.136). In their pastosity and velvety dullness, the later applied structures sculpturally lift from the softly shimmering painted layer below and give the impression of floating. The cutting of the picture edge emphasises the cropped character. The optical lightness and freshness of this work exemplifies the liberated opening of the pictorial space that characterises Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Pictures.