“I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming – that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original – then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.”
W ith its bold smears of richly textured primary colors of green, blue and red, Grün-Blau-Rot stands as an exceptional and intimately scaled example of Gerhard Richter’s investigation into the compositional challenges of abstraction. Executed in 1993 in collaboration with the Swiss art magazine Parkett, the present work is part of a larger series, each executed in similar formats and differing in the compositions created by the use of Richter’s iconic squeegee technique.
From the late 1970s until the late 1980s, Richter created his abstract paintings almost exclusively by using a squeegee, a long and narrow scraper to draw paint across the canvas. This method resulted in an unpredictable application of oil paint, ultimately leaving the behavior of the medium to chance. At some moments creating smooth overlapping layers of paints and at others tearing into striated patches on its surface, this method ultimately creates the sensation of depth and space while blurring the actual order of application. Richter describes his abstract paintings as “fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.” In Richter’s work, the painting sets the parameters of its own reality. Richter says he doesn't know reality, he just knows what impressions he has of reality. Impressions are always changing as is the appearance of reality always changing. His reality is paint and the different ways he can manipulate it. As the artist expresses it, “later you realize that you can’t represent reality at all – that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality” (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Rolf Schön, in: ibid., p. 59).
The mechanical, arbitrary mode of execution in Grün-Blau-Rot epitomizes Richter's bridging of the two apparently dichotomous realms of abstraction and figuration. The title and color palette of the present works immediately recalls the ‘RGB’ (red, green and blue) color model – through which the three main light wavelengths merge to create images in analogue photography. In doing so, Grün-Blau-Rot perfectly embodies Richter’s declaration: “I’m not trying to imitate a photograph, I’m trying to make one. And if I disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper exposed to light, then I am practicing photography by other means. Those of my paintings that have no photographic source (e.g. the abstracts) are also photographs.” (Gerhard Richter cited in: Katja Silverman, Flesh of my Flesh, California 2009, p. 173).
Richter’s abstraction stands as the ultimate culmination to the epic journey of his career, during which he has ceaselessly interrogated the limits of representation, the nature of perception and the operations of visual cognition. Simultaneously evoking Joan Mitchell’s exuberance and transformative color and Jackson Pollock’s instigation of autonomous composition, Richter’s abstraction is a tour de force of conceptual rigor and exceptional beauty.
