Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

"Abstract paintings... visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe but which we may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality; the unknown, the ungraspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted in terms of substitute images like heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity, that is to say, with all the means at the disposal of art, 'nothing'... [in abstract paintings] we allow ourselves to see the un-seeable, that which has never before been seen and indeed is not visible."
-Gerhard Richter, quoted in J. Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, London, 2000, p. 374.

This lot will be included in the forthcoming fifth volume of the official catalogue raisonné of the artist, edited by the Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden.