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rguably the most sought after and highly prized European abstract painter, Gerhard Richter occupies a pivotal position in the field of Contemporary Art. His hunger for experimentation and technical innovation completely revolutionized abstract painting. Until 1976, Richter was known as a realist painter working from photographic source material in black and white and primarily preoccupied with perception. In the 1980s he began making abstract paintings in earnest, developing a revolutionary technique in which he spread layers of saturated color across the picture plane with a squeegee.
As a painter working primarily at scale and on canvas, works on paper from his abstract series are scarce. The series of abstract works on paper are titled after the date they were painted and were created intermittently from the early 1980s onwards. These works were a crucial arena of experimentation that gave Richter the freedom to explore his shift away from his earlier figurative style. “Untitled (6.4.86), (1986)” is a key component of the creative impulse that anticipated Richter’s growing success, painted just weeks after the conclusion of the artist’s first major international touring retrospective in 1986, in which his works was shown in Düsseldorf and Berlin, as well as Bern, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria. Like many artists Richter highly valued the effervescent sense of spontaneity that painting on paper allowed. “Drawing or painting on paper is more impulsive than painting on canvas” Richter told art critic Ann Tilroe in an interview in 1987. “I found that the directness of the works on paper led to randomness and virtuosity.”
Richter would work on multiple artworks simultaneously, leaning canvases up against the wall of his studio, alternating between squeegee and brush, and adding each layer sequentially to let the paint dry on one canvas before applying the next layer. Rejecting rigidity and premeditation, Richter opened himself up to the unpredictability of the squeegee technique that would become his trademark, and by 1986 he fully immersed himself in the spontaneity of his abstract work. The resulting paintings featured unpredictable and resplendent swathes of marbled color, punctuated by ripples and streams of vivid pigment. Richter’s abstract paintings have a very tactile physicality that reflects the motion of the artist’s body dragging the squeegee across the canvas, reminiscent of the inherent movement within the works of the American action painters like Arshile Gorky and especially Franz Kline. His inimitable painting style was the subject of the 2011 feature length documentary “Gerhard Richter Painting,” which gave viewers a rare glimpse of the artist at work in his Cologne studio.
Despite his accelerating acclaim, Richter’s works on paper remained a relatively obscure part of his extensive oeuvre until the late 1980s. It wasn’t until the Museum Overholland staged the first ever exhibition dedicated to the artist’s work on paper in Amsterdam 1987 that his works on paper were prominently displayed in an institutional setting. “Untitled (6.4.86), (1986)” was included in that seminal exhibition. Today Richter’s works on paper are regarded as a critical element of his rich and varied body of work that not only complement his paintings, but also illustrate the range of his substantial artistic output, and stand out as highly significant and outstanding works of art in their own right.
The present artwork is a particularly sublime example of his works on paper that shares the radiance of his most renowned works from the Abstaktes Bild series created around the same t.mes in the mid 1980s. It also stands out as unusually large artwork among Richter’s paper works, which the artist typically restricted to a more modest scale. The composition features green, yellow, and red oils spread across the surface of the paper, and is interspersed with energetic brushstrokes along the upper right and central sections of the sheet.
Featuring Richter’s career-defining technical innovation and displaying his unrivaled skills as a colorist, his abstract works on paper are not only part of the artist’s most celebrated and recognizable series’ they are unquestionably among the most iconic and famous images in art history.
