Live Auction 5710Post War and Contemporary Art Day Auction
Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)
Lot 242 PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN GENTLEMAN

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

Grün-Blau-Rot

Closed12 October 2012

Price Realised

GBP 229,250

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Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)
Grün-Blau-Rot
signed, numbered and dated 'zu 789 Richter, 93' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
11 x 15in. (30 x 40cm.)
Painted in 1993

Anon. sale, Ketterer Kunst München, 2 June 2006, lot 55.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Specialist note

'In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualisable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy of all the resources of art, in fact in order to depict 'nothing'. Accustomed to pictures in which we recognise something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere colour (however multifarious) as the thing visualised. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualisable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events more accessible... So, in dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, extremer, more visual and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture.' (G. Richter quoted in H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, Cambridge 1995, p. 100).