GERHARD RICHTER (GERMANY, B. 1932)

Painted in 1986, Abstraktes Bild is a spectacular panorama of vibrant colour. Filling the entire canvas, fiery orange and red streaks merge and erupt, while rushes of blue cascade across the blazing expanse. Abstraktes Bild was painted using brushes and their handles, as well as the artist’s signature squeegee technique for which Richter drags paint to produce iridescent blurs of colour and a richly textured choreography of strata. Of his squeegee method, he has said, ‘It is a good technique for switching off thinking. Consciously, I can’t calculate the result. But subconsciously, I can sense it. This is a nice “between” state’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, ‘Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei’, Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20). In Abstraktes Bild, the result is a meditation on chromatic relations and a dematerialization of visual order as the colours succumb to one another.

Richter has been playing with the relationship between abstraction and figuration since the late 1960s, and his series of blurred photorealist paintings point to the evolution to come. The three figures in Frau Wolleh mit Kindern (Mrs. Wolleh with Children), 1968, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, almost liquify as their edges dissolve into the tan background. Such works lay the foundation for Richter’s turn to complete abstraction, and the artist embraced a form that was predicted in both erasure and insertion. Richter has said that ‘abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality, which we can neither see nor describe, but which we may nevertheless conclude exists’ (G. Richter, quoted in R. Nasgaard, ‘Gerhard Richter’ in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat., Chicago, 1988, p. 107). With its flood of potent colour, Abstraktes Bild illuminates a feverish landscape of bright, burning intensity.