Pulsating in its rich chromatic power, Abstraktes Bild is a captivating example of Gerhard Richter’s highly celebrated body of Abstract paintings. Executed in 1986, at the apex of Richter’s career-breakthrough, the present work is at once compositionally complex and impressive in its gestural power, delivering a theatrical play of chance and control, culminating in a spectacular harmony of vivid colour. Following a corpus of nascent abstractions executed between the years of 1980-85, the present work heralds a decisive break and an undeniable achievement as Richter relinquishes planned compositional elements of form and structure in favour of the indeterminate scrape and accretion of the squeegee. On the surface of the present work, a striking scarlet layer dances across the canvas, its undulating movement creating a rhythmical play across the surface. Between the rippling curtain of red, layers of canary yellow, emerald green and royal blue coalesce into an exuberant symphony of hues.
Right: Franz Kline, Dahlia, 1962, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Image: © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York/ Scala, Florence, Artwork: © DACS, London
In this theatre of spectacular colour, abstraction gives way to a confluence of painterly traditions and history. In the upper right corner, a radiant burst of canary yellow disperses into a majestic white, reminiscent of beaming sunlight glimmering through the veil of red pigment. Layered atop the deep blue shadows, short bursts of green scrapes create a layered sense of gentle movement, as if wisps of greenery are swaying in the wind. On one hand, the large canvas recalls the works of Modern masters, such as the geometric abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky’s early landscapes or the bold and vivid colours of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. On the other hand, Richter also evokes the powerful emotive energy of Clyfford Still’s Colour Field abstractions, and the sweeping gestural energy of Franz Kline’s bodily brushwork. From the pioneers of modern painting to the giants of twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism, the present work forms an astounding dialogue which brings together the history of painting in a single work. In this picture, as evident in the very best of the Abstrakte Bilder from 1986 onwards, Richter brings to the fore the infinite potential for painting to not only respond to art history, but also to form an analogy for the coexistence of seemingly disparate and contradictory elements.
Center: A B, Still, 1986. Sold at Replica Shoes 's New York for $33.9 million in 2016.
Right: Abstraktes Bild, 1986. Achieved £24.1 million ($29 million) at Replica Shoes 's London in March 2023.
Distinguished by the confident use of the squeegee, Abstraktes Bild is charged with a sense of powerful physicality. Dazzlingly illustrated by the present example, the year 1986 marked the beginning of new heights in Richter’s abstraction, when the squeegee became the artist’s principal tool. Richter at this moment however, also maintains an equally confident use of brushwork, which come together to culminate in a uniquely potent gestural energy. As Dietmar Elger explained, 1986 represents a significant year and a turning point in the development of Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder, “characterised by both balance and tension between the oil paint applied with the brush and oil paint applied with the squeegee” (Dietmar Elger, “Abstraktes Bild (596) and Richter’s Abstract Paintings,” Sotheby’s, online). Indeed, on the surface of the present work, vigorous brushstrokes emerge through the rich swathes of the squeegee, disrupting the geometry of the vertical scraping in a commanding gesture. Measuring 200 by 160 cent.mes ters, the powerful scrapes of densely layered pigment engulf the viewer into the realm of kaleidoscopic chaos. Attesting to the spectacular quality of works from this year, other Abstrakte Bilder from 1986 are housed in prestigious institutional collects ions around the world, and the sister painting to the present work, Abstraktes Bild (611-1) resides in the Albertina in Vienna, while paintings directly following this cycle are housed in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (612-1); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (612-3) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (613-1).
Image/Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2023
During this significant year of this painting's execution, Gerhard Richter and Benjamin Buchloh spoke at length in one of the most important interviews of the artist’s career. Fuelled by the success of his most recent paintings, Richter extolled the potential of these pictures following almost 30 years of relentless inquiry into painting in the post-modern post-photographic age. “What I am trying to do in each picture,” Richter explained to Buchloh, “is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter in conversation with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961 – 2007, London 2009, p. 187). Richter’s abstract paintings thus form an analogy that stretches beyond the pictorial and reaches into the realms of the social, moral and even the political. Richter offers the viewer a picture, which, in his own words, embodies and delivers a metaphor for the “greatest possible freedom” without the false promise of “Paradises” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Ibid.).
Comparable Abstrakte Bilder from 1986 in Museum collects ions
Deployed with spectacular force and atmospheric sensitivity, formal qualities of texture, colour and structure come together in Abstraktes Bild to form a uniquely evocative dialogue between the material qualities of paint. Though comprising of seemingly infinite tonal variations and intimations of abyssal layers beyond the picture plane, Abstraktes Bild is nonetheless a simultaneous acknowledgment and cancellation of the kind of image space pioneered by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Ineluctably glorious in its enveloping celebration of colour, an experience of unbridled structure and boundless chromatic affect is nonetheless disrupted. As outlined by Benjamin Buchloh: “[I]f the ability of colour to generate this emotional, spiritual quality is presented and at the same t.mes
negated at all points, surely its always cancelling itself out. With so many combinations, so many permutational relationships, there can’t be any harmonious chromatic order, or compositional either, because there are no ordered relations left either in the colour system or the spatial system” (Benjamin Buchloh quoted in: Benhamin Buchloch, ed., “An Interview with Gerhard Richter,” Gerhard Richter: October Files, Massachusetts 2009, pp. 23-24). Much like a palimpsest in its layered surface and repeated working over, the present work resembles a confluence of many paintings at once. The exuberant strata of paint bear the ghosts of previous accretions and colour juxtapositions applied, erased, remade and obliterated over again. Such chromatic and compositional negations represent Richter’s rebuttal of the bold idealism of 1950s abstraction: "Pollock, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, their heroism derived from the climate of their t.mes
, but we do not have this climate." (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Michael Kimmelmann, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms,” The New York t.mes
s, January 27, 2002, n.p.) Rather, the climate in which Richter’s entire production concerns itself with, is the contemporary age of the photographic and the heterogeneous.
- 1965
- 1968
- 1969
- 1974
- 1982
- 1982
- 1986
- 1992
- 2006
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Woman Descending the Staircase (Frau die Treppe herabgehend)
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
In the mid 1960s, Richter begins his Photo Paintings. These works are figurative works in which Richter transferred found photographs, both personal snapshots and from other media sources, onto canvas and then dragged a dry brush through the wet pigment, thus blurring the image and rendering the forms elusive. -
Domplatz, Mailand
Sold at Replica Shoes 's New York for $37.1 million in 2013.
Richter continues to expand his Photo Paintings. Measuring three meters in height and width, Domplatz, Mainland is one of Richter's largest photo realist paintings. -
Seestuck (bewolkt)
Richter begins his Seascapes in 1968, painting them throughout the next thirty years. Continuing his exploration of boundaries between photography and painting, the Seascapes mark Richter's response to the emergence of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, and in particular his interest in the notion of seriality. -
4096 Farben
Sold in Replica Shoes 's New York for $21.9 million in 2023.
Executed in 1974, 4096 Farben emerges as a milestone of Richter’s pivotal Colour Chart paintings. First incorporating chance into his creative process, the Colour Charts mark one of the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in Richter's career. -
Kerze
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
A paragon of the Photo Paintings that Richter had perfected since the early 1960s, Richter's series of Kerze (Candle) is an important motif in the artist's career. Painting a photograph of a candle, Richter presents a beautiful post-script to the ancient role of a candle as provider of light. -
1982Gelbgrün (Yellow-Green)
Sold at Replica Shoes 's London for £10.8 million ($15.5 million) in 2018.
Alongside the photo-realist Kerze paintings, Richter in 1982 also begins a completely divergent body of abstract paintings. Marking the beginning of his ground-breaking Abstraktes Bilder, Richter starts deploying the squeegee as a tool for painting, and Gelbgrün (Yellow-Green) demonstrates his early experimentation with the device. -
Abstraktes Bild
The present work
The present work marks the most pivotal breakthrough in Richter's career as he begins to utilise the squeegee as his principal tool. Creating abstract compositions through scraping layers of paint with a squeegee, Richter allows the composition to be determined by the chance indeterminate scrapes, culminating in a brilliant interplay of colour and gestural power demonstrated in the present work. -
Bach (4)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
As he enters the 1990s, Richter continues to expand his body of abstract works, mastering and continually experimenting with new ways to engage with the squeegee and the scraping motion. -
Cage 1
Tate, London
The Cage paintings are a group of six large, square canvases, named after American minimalist and experimental composer John Cage, whom Richter greatly admired and to whose music the artist listened during the period he was making these paintings in 2006. The Cage paintings were displayed for the first t.mes at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, marking Richter's his international recognition as one of the most important contemporary artists of our t.mes .
Gerhard Richter’s unprecedented art of abstraction stands as ultimate culmination to the epic journey of an extraordinary career, during which the artist has ceaselessly interrogated the limits of representation, the nature of perception, and the operations of visual cognition. Variously evoking something of the rolling hills of Kandinsky, the physicality of Kline’s canvases and Pollock’s instigation of autonomous composition, Richter’s abstraction is ultimately without comparison. The vast expanse of the present Asbtraktes Bild is utterly replete with the most spectacular colour, form and texture; a sheer cliff face of unadulterated expression as delivered by one of the greatest contemporary painters working today. Within the field of this canvas, acts of chaos evoke something not quite of this realm, but rather something that is both unfathomable and phenomenal.
