Collapsing realism and abstraction into a continuum, Gerhard Richter’s Antelio Glas blurs conceptual delineations in an idiosyncratic attempt to purge the painterly act of any mark-making process. Executed in 2002, the present work hails from the artist’s Glass and Mirrors series from 1993 to 2004. Constituting a small, yet complex and highly conceptual body of work, Antelio Glas sits late in the series, posing Richter’s remarkable philosophical enquiry into the constructed reality of pictorial space. A phenomenological visual experience engages the spectator in the complex dialectic at the interstice of figuration and abstraction, enabling the artist to emphasise the discrepancy between image and reality, while simultaneously embracing notions of enigma, uncertainty, and transience. Building on the critical conceptual tendencies first explored by the artist in his formative 1960s, with seminal works such as Vier Glasscheiben, the Colour Charts, and his monochromatic abstract compositions, Antelio Glas entirely captures the intellectual essence of Richter’s oeuvre. Befitting the work’s importance, Antelio Glas was exhibited at the Berlin National Neuegalerie as part of Gerhard Richter’s major travelling retrospective Panorama in 2012.

Pushing the logical paradigm of traditional painting ad extremum, Richter’s Antelio Glas is completely devoid of his typical painterly medium. Employing different.mes ans to create paintings, the materiality of Richter’s glass panel allows the work an inherent ability to both capture and reflect its surroundings. First employing glass as medium in 1967 with 4 Panes of Glass, Richter's continued ability to challenge the conceptual boundaries of painting with the material is wholly encapsulated in the present work. While artists previously employed the material – such as Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) that presented two smashed panes of glass variously painted and filled with foil and wire, or Robert Ryman’s Surface Veil works painted on fiberglass – Richter boldly presents an untarnished piece of glass displayed away from the wall. Antelio Glas simultaneously mirrors the still, monochromatic wall and the shifting, diffuse reflection of the viewer. The act of seeing takes precedence over structure, suggesting an inherent absence of certitude.

Instead of making an image, Richter’s cantilevered glass panel reflects everything yet interprets nothing. Veering between depth and flatness, Antelio Glas engages with paradigms that shaped Western painting since the Renaissance. At once a window into the world and a mirror reflecting that which stands before it, Richter converges these enduring tropes in Antelio Glas, allowing it to behave as an agent of transparency and reflection. On an impressive scale the medium itself then becomes a means to veil, negate and neutralise the image material, highlighting the ordinariness of the composition that takes shape in concert with the beholder. Providing an entirely different relationship to space from his Mirror sculptures, Antelio Glas facilitates a stable relationship to its surroundings while being endlessly pliable and ceaselessly mutating.

Richter’s astonishing investigation of reality and representation spans his entire career, and his glass sculptures have received widespread institutional acclaim. Other works from the series are held in the collects ion of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate collects ion, London. Antelio Glas marks a moment of great professional triumph for Richter, reaffirming the possibilities of modern art through conceptual subversion and substance, a matter-of-fact presence that anchors the complex exploration of the limits of painting to one of Richter’s purest articulations of the mercurial quality of his practice.