E xuberantly iridescent in its high-keyed sheens of colors and variegated chromatic textures, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild from 1983 is an essay in color; a perfect exemplar of the artist’s ability to variegate texture, timbre, tone, and hue in order to create paintings of stunning quality and astounding complexity. Hailing from 1983, this is an early abstract painting situated at the genesis of Richter’s remarkable journey from photorealist exactitude into abstract splendor. Taking a random photographic snapshot of an early sketch and reproducing the image on canvas, Richter then orchestrated a sublime symphony of chance, layering, erasure and chromatic power on top of the luminous ground. The resulting work is spectacular in its display of a complex interplay of color, in which horizontal veils of stuttering paint present a riposte to the vertical drag of wide brushstrokes. This riveting color application and manner of concealing and revealing results in a dense layering of composition which serves as relic of Richter’s thoughts and processes as he brought the painting to life; in the mesmerizing field, painterly elements both spar against and complement each other while the paint’s chromatic value injects this piece with an undisputed brilliance. The balance between hard and soft, structural solidity and phosphorescence, photographic and the abstract, renders the present work a remarkable exposition of the very apogee of Richter’s abstract canon.

In the first two decades of his mature practice Richter had established an unimpeachable reputation as a photorealist painter of utmost skill. It was only between 1980 and 1987, during which t.mes the present work was created, that he focused his energies on the creation of a vibrant corpus of works that radically reconfigured the aesthetic capacities of abstract painting. This shift in depictive styles ran in direct opposition to the contemporaneous popular art discourse, which had been dominated by Pop art and Minimalism while Richter was preoccupied with precise figuration, and which moved towards the kind of aesthetically aggressive figurative painting propagated by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georg Baselitz in the early 1980s whilst Richter focused on abstraction. Thus, at each stage of his career Richter was able to carve out his own critical space and assert his own aesthetic identity. Richter’s abstract works from the 1980s and beyond cannot be seen as a reprisal of any previously established mode of artistic communication. Particularly when compared to the wild and immediate mark-making of his Neo-Expressionist contemporaries, the mode of depiction propagated in works such as Garten denotes his peerlessly methodical inquiry into the absolute limits of abstraction in the painted arts.

Richter’s genius lies in his unique ability to contrast alternate painterly modes and tonalities. In the present work, geometric fields of vivid pigment are juxtaposed with paroxysmal yet purposeful marks, and blurred gradation is met with scraped veils of diaphanous color, resulting in a canvas rife with limitless magnetism and supreme power. Executed on the cusp of his full espousal of the squeegee as a decisive painterly tool, the present work recounts Richter’s movement away from experimentation with anti-painting – as defined by the Farben (Color Charts) and Grau (Grey Paintings) – and instead explores the phenomenological limits of color by indulging in a vibrantly energetic abstract compositional mode. Evocative of color theories that Neo-Impressionists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac utilized to create vibrating painted surfaces, the continually varied tonality and intensely numerous variations of contrasting hues within each millimeter of the canvas create an intensely unstable perceptive field. Richter’s surrender to the laws of chance also allows for abrupt disruptions to otherwise flowing transitions of color – in this case outbreaks of violent red and canary yellow. Thus a new sense of layered depth is instilled by the inherent incongruity of the contrasting colors that are layered over one another. Like feedback interruptions to radio signals these momentary blips to the visual field conjure uniquely enigmatic presences that shatter confidence in our own perceptive capacities. Indeed, in the present work Richter achieves transparency and opacity, solidity and depth, in an ocularly stimulating space that is both physical and cerebral.

Richter called the works executed in the early 1980s ‘free abstracts’, a name aptly conveying the artist’s embrace of movement and irregularity. The oscillation between conscious choice and control versus chance and randomness is central to Richter’s conceptual approach to abstraction: “This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: It has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself” (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Sabine Schütz in Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interview and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 256). Always in flux, the exuberant strata of paint bear the ghosts of previous accretions and color juxtapositions applied, erased, remade and obliterated over again. Such chromatic and compositional negations represent Richter’s rebuttal of the bold idealism of 1950s American abstraction and the idea of a transcendental sacred image space; with the repeated synthesis of chance and erasure as defining traits of its execution, the present work becomes independent of the artist and acquires its own inimitable and autonomous individuality.