T hrumming in chords of deep red pigment, and exploding over the sheet with hints of red and swathes of blue, 14.2.88 epitomizes the brilliant resolution of Gerhard Richter’s ceaseless explorations into the limits of representation and nature of perception. Richter’s peerless formal execution and prodigious output have earned him unparalleled international recognition and acclaim; over the course of over fifty years, his work has been celebrated with numerous retrospectives by the most prestigious museums worldwide. Considered one of today’s greatest living artists, Richter continues to push the boundaries of painting, engaging his viewers in an ever-changing and intriguing intellectual dialogue.

Stunning in its chromatic vibrancy, 14.2.88 stuns the viewer in waves of scarlet, flecks of white and pulls of crimson paint in an entirely abstract composition that nevertheless creates a powerful sensation of distance and perspective. As the squeegee is dragged across an expanse of paper, the pressure and speed of Richter’s application of paint ultimately surrenders to the unpredictability of chance in informing the composition. It is this separation of the artist from direct expression that bestows Richter’s paintings with their inherently natural look. Through the spontaneity of his working method, Richter’s realizes his artistic ideology of his Abstrakte Bilder bringing them to a work on paper: “I want to end up with a picture that I haven’t planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture…I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself” (The artist in: Hubertus Butin and Stefan Gronert, Eds., Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 36). The variegated surface that results, creates a dynamic visual experience and forges a portrait of temporal genius, one that forces the viewer to constantly refocus due to the overwhelming assault of pictorial data.

Throughout his career, Richter has questioned the reliability of painting and its function, beginning in a t.mes when the medium itself had been completely eclipsed in favor of new and more innovative artistic techniques. Richter himself noted: “I was out of fashion for a long t.mes after the early 1960s work, and painting itself was unfashionable to.” (The artist in: Richard Cork, “Gerhard Richter: A Divided German,” Apollo, London, January 1992, p. 49). Yet even today, Richter’s cerebral probings into the purpose and merits of painting remain relevant, challenging, and insightful. Moving seamlessly from the representational to the abstract, Richter’s corpus has continued to defy traditional classification, instead surging forth, as in the present work, into an entirely new genre of Postmodernism. Within the dramatic arena of Abstraktes Bild, Richter lays bare his distrust of the grand theories of the gestural painting that revolutionized the canon in the 1950s, while simultaneously calling these new ideologies into question through the lens of abstract painting itself.

Richter’s unprecedented abstraction stands as the ultimate culmination of his epic artistic journey, during which he has challenged the very nature and purpose of painting through the medium itself. Evoking the highest quality of artistic prowess and dexterity with his technique perhaps only reached by such masters as Claude Monet, Clyfford Still and Willem de Kooning, 14.2.88 stands among the pinnacle achievements of this prolific artist’s career.

Artist

Gerhard Richter