Chromatically arresting and compositionally complex, Abstraktes Bild is part of Gerhard Richter’s seminal opus of abstraction – an aesthetic investigation that has preoccupied the artist for more than four decades. Executed in 1987, the painting aptly demonstrates the theatre of Richter’s idiosyncratic painterly method, and witnesses the full induction of the squeegee as principal painterly tool. As the fourth iteration within a four-part cycle of Abstrakte Bilder numbered 630-1 to 630-4 in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, the present work was executed following a period of remarkable production and a number of solo exhibitions at prestigious museums, among them Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1977), the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (1978 and 1980), Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1979) and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1985), Abstraktes Bild exemplifies the seductive painterly sensibility that has defined Richter’s celebrated oeuvre.

Richter discovered the squeegee in 1979, an artistic revelation that would have a lasting and profound impact on his entire future production. In 1987, the year that the present work was executed, he began using the squeegee as his principle tool for creating abstract paintings. By employing the squeegee to scrape layers of pigment in an act of erasure, Richter was able to bring forth surfaces with rich tactility and symphonic colour. Abstraktes Bild bears the indexical trace of Richter’s movements, much like the work of the American action painters, tracing where Richter drew the squeegee across the canvas in successive layers. On the surface of the present work, each passage of colliding paint more dynamic than the next, the foregrounding scrapes in lime green and blue build a uniquely vivacious composition. The body of solid green, dynamically interjected by a sweeping blue, is outstanding in its boldness, set against a field of fiery red, indigo blue, amber and jet black. Embracing a kind of automatism via the squeegee kinetic energy is compounded into the painterly surface of Abstraktes Bild. Hence Richter’s painting technique precipitates an infinite and unknowable number of permutations born out of the interactions between the oil pigments.

It was also at this t.mes that Richter was experimenting with overpainting photographic landscapes, merging the photographic reproduction with abstract materiality. Between 1985 and 1986, Richter took both his sfumato photo-painting method and his abstract squeegee paintings – the Abstrakte Bilder – to a mature state of resolve, giving birth to his iconic Venice series where a set of photo-realist paintings become progressively more abstracted. On the surface of the present work, glimpses of a landscape seem to emerge from beneath the heavy layer of green and blue, a red diagonal mountain peak seemingly plunging into misty waters against a hazy sky. Transitioning into a period of intense abstraction, Richter described his new approach during this seminal period: “So I set out in the totally opposite direction… I put random, illogical colours and forms… colourful, sent.mes ntal, associative, anachronistic, random, polysemic, almost like pseudopsychograms, except that they are not legible, because they are devoid of meaning or logic… An exciting business, at all events, as if a new door had opened for me” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Dietmar Elger Ed., Gerhard Richter. Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3, 1976-1987, Ostfildern, 2013, p. 16). Richter’s Abstraktes Bild is a methodological dialogue with chance; although he varies his pressure and speed, ultimately the blunt tool of the squeegee dictates the composition, and the skips and slippages inherent to the process inform the end result. The harmonious yet discordant orchestration of paint on the surface of Abstraktes Bild vacillates between an act of intense evocation and a simultaneous effacement of painterly form: Ingrained in the work’s destructive and unpredictable formation is a reflection of nature itself.

Distinguished by its bold geometry and strident colour palette, Abstraktes Bild is a visually arresting example of Gerhard Richter’s revered body of abstract paintings. At once visually demanding and effortlessly elegant, the present work delivers a superlative balance between colour and texture, creation and erasure, revealing and concealing a magnificent model of Richter’s inimitable inquiry into abstraction.