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Descriptif du lot
‘All that I am trying to do in each picture is to bring together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the greatest possible freedom.’ – Gerhard Richter
Chance and control are central to Gerhard Richter's practice, yet his art is ultimately driven by a fundamental question: how do we make meaning from what we see? Created at a pivotal moment in Gerhard Richter's ascent to international prominence, Abstraktes Bild belongs to the celebrated group of 30 red-dominant abstract paintings executed in 1991, of which only 27 remain today. The series marked the first occasion in Richter's abstract practice in which he concentrated with such intensity on a single colour, testing the expressive and conceptual possibilities of red across a sequence of closely related works. Most were unveiled at Galerie Liliane & Michel Durand-Dessert in Paris in September 1991, including the present painting. Richly layered and exceptionally chromatic, Abstraktes Bild stands among the most visually complex examples of the series, with flashes of yellow, blue, green and white emerging through its luminous red surface. Created in the same year as Richter's landmark retrospective at Tate Gallery, London, and following the major touring retrospectives that cemented his international reputation during the late 1980s, the work belongs to a defining chapter in the artist's career. Examples from this rare body of red paintings are today held in major public collections including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, underscoring the series' enduring significance within Richter's oeuvre.
Although frequently discussed as abstractions, Richter's paintings could be part of a lifelong investigation into the nature of images themselves. Throughout his career, Richter repeatedly challenged the assumption that pictures communicate fixed meanings. Whether working from newspaper photographs, family snapshots, mirrors, landscapes or abstract fields of colour, he remained fascinated by the unstable relationship between reality and representation. His paintings expose the mechanisms through which meaning is constructed, inviting viewers to confront the ways they project memory, experience and expectation onto what they see.
This inquiry emerged from the particular historical circumstances that shaped Richter's generation. Born in Dresden in 1932, he was educated under the strictures of Socialist Realism in East Germany and witnessed the competing ideologies that claimed authority in postwar Europe. Having defected from East Germany to the West in 1961, just before the construction of the Berlin Wall, Gerhard Richter experienced first-hand the total collapse of the ideological, cultural, and moral absolute truths peddled by both the Nazi regime and Soviet-style communism. Within this context, traditional landscape painting no longer functioned as an uncomplicated vehicle for meaning. A landscape possessed no inherent significance; its meanings were created through memory, history and human experience. Richter's work repeatedly returns to this notion, suggesting that images continually reshaped by those who look at them.
Such thinking underpins Richter's celebrated photo-paintings, in which recognisable subjects are obscured through his distinctive blur. At first glance these works appear to deny the clarity normally associated with photography. Despite the blurring of edges and details, viewers instinctively reconstruct what is missing, identifying faces, places and landscapes. In his blurred landscapes of the 1980s, Richter demonstrated that images need not be clear to remain meaningful. Even as forms dissolve, viewers continue to perceive places, atmospheres and spatial relationships, instinctively completing what remains uncertain.
Richter's exploration of perception did not end with the blurred photo-paintings. During the late 1980s, Richter had recently devoted himself to a series of red and grey mirrors, objects that dispensed with representation altogether and instead transformed the viewer into the subject of the artwork. In these works, the painted image is replaced by reflection. The artwork changes with every shift in light, viewpoint and spectator, making the viewer an active component of the work itself. Abstraktes Bild (746-4) extends this investigation. Where the mirrors generate meaning through reflection, the painting does so through ambiguity, encouraging viewers to search for images, landscapes and associations within a surface that resists fixed interpretation.
Executed using the squeegee technique that Richter had developed from the 1980s onward, Abstraktes Bild embodies the tension between control and chance that characterises his mature abstraction. Successive applications of paint are spread, scraped, concealed and revealed, producing a surface that records both creation and destruction. Beneath its dominant red field, traces of blue, yellow, green and white emerge only to disappear again beneath subsequent layers. At different moments, viewers may sense horizons, geological formations or atmospheric effects, despite the absence of any explicit subject matter. The painting demonstrates Richter's remarkable ability to evoke the experience of landscape without depicting landscape directly.
‘It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.’ – Claude Monet
Richter's red abstractions of 1991 represent a decisive moment in his ongoing investigation of perception and pictorial ambiguity. In Abstraktes Bild, layers of crimson are built up and disrupted through a process of scraping, revealing flashes of colour beneath the surface that suggest depth, atmosphere and fleeting traces of landscape. The painting hovers between emergence and erasure, refusing to settle into a stable image and instead demanding sustained acts of looking. While Claude Monet's late Water Lilies offer a revealing point of comparison, Richter's paintings extend this investigation into the nature of seeing itself. Rather than depicting a motif observed in the world, he constructs a space in which appearance remains fluid, shifting constantly between image, memory and sensation. Although separated by nearly a century, both artists challenge the notion of a fixed image, emphasising instead the instability of vision and the act of looking itself. Through layered colour, optical ambiguity and the dissolution of compositional hierarchy, Monet and Richter engage in a cross-generational dialogue.
The work also invites intriguing comparisons with older pictorial traditions in which absence and ambiguity play active roles in perception. The method of leaving expansive voids (liubai or leaving space) of Song dynasty landscape painting were never conceived as empty space; rather, they functioned as sites of contemplation, allowing viewers to mentally traverse the image and complete its meaning. Richter's red abstractions somehow theoretically echoed these traditions in their reliance upon the viewer's imagination.
Abstraktes Bild brings together some of the artist's most enduring exploration. The blurred photo-paintings questioned the reliability of images; the mirror works dissolved the distinction between image and reality; and the red abstractions push these inquiries into their purest form. The work embodies Richter's conviction that meaning does not reside in an image itself, but is projected onto it through memory, experience and perception. At a time when abstraction had been repeatedly challenged by Conceptual and postmodern critiques, Richter reaffirmed painting's capacity to engage profound questions of perception and meaning.
Chance and control are central to Gerhard Richter's practice, yet his art is ultimately driven by a fundamental question: how do we make meaning from what we see? Created at a pivotal moment in Gerhard Richter's ascent to international prominence, Abstraktes Bild belongs to the celebrated group of 30 red-dominant abstract paintings executed in 1991, of which only 27 remain today. The series marked the first occasion in Richter's abstract practice in which he concentrated with such intensity on a single colour, testing the expressive and conceptual possibilities of red across a sequence of closely related works. Most were unveiled at Galerie Liliane & Michel Durand-Dessert in Paris in September 1991, including the present painting. Richly layered and exceptionally chromatic, Abstraktes Bild stands among the most visually complex examples of the series, with flashes of yellow, blue, green and white emerging through its luminous red surface. Created in the same year as Richter's landmark retrospective at Tate Gallery, London, and following the major touring retrospectives that cemented his international reputation during the late 1980s, the work belongs to a defining chapter in the artist's career. Examples from this rare body of red paintings are today held in major public collections including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, underscoring the series' enduring significance within Richter's oeuvre.
Although frequently discussed as abstractions, Richter's paintings could be part of a lifelong investigation into the nature of images themselves. Throughout his career, Richter repeatedly challenged the assumption that pictures communicate fixed meanings. Whether working from newspaper photographs, family snapshots, mirrors, landscapes or abstract fields of colour, he remained fascinated by the unstable relationship between reality and representation. His paintings expose the mechanisms through which meaning is constructed, inviting viewers to confront the ways they project memory, experience and expectation onto what they see.
This inquiry emerged from the particular historical circumstances that shaped Richter's generation. Born in Dresden in 1932, he was educated under the strictures of Socialist Realism in East Germany and witnessed the competing ideologies that claimed authority in postwar Europe. Having defected from East Germany to the West in 1961, just before the construction of the Berlin Wall, Gerhard Richter experienced first-hand the total collapse of the ideological, cultural, and moral absolute truths peddled by both the Nazi regime and Soviet-style communism. Within this context, traditional landscape painting no longer functioned as an uncomplicated vehicle for meaning. A landscape possessed no inherent significance; its meanings were created through memory, history and human experience. Richter's work repeatedly returns to this notion, suggesting that images continually reshaped by those who look at them.
Such thinking underpins Richter's celebrated photo-paintings, in which recognisable subjects are obscured through his distinctive blur. At first glance these works appear to deny the clarity normally associated with photography. Despite the blurring of edges and details, viewers instinctively reconstruct what is missing, identifying faces, places and landscapes. In his blurred landscapes of the 1980s, Richter demonstrated that images need not be clear to remain meaningful. Even as forms dissolve, viewers continue to perceive places, atmospheres and spatial relationships, instinctively completing what remains uncertain.
Richter's exploration of perception did not end with the blurred photo-paintings. During the late 1980s, Richter had recently devoted himself to a series of red and grey mirrors, objects that dispensed with representation altogether and instead transformed the viewer into the subject of the artwork. In these works, the painted image is replaced by reflection. The artwork changes with every shift in light, viewpoint and spectator, making the viewer an active component of the work itself. Abstraktes Bild (746-4) extends this investigation. Where the mirrors generate meaning through reflection, the painting does so through ambiguity, encouraging viewers to search for images, landscapes and associations within a surface that resists fixed interpretation.
Executed using the squeegee technique that Richter had developed from the 1980s onward, Abstraktes Bild embodies the tension between control and chance that characterises his mature abstraction. Successive applications of paint are spread, scraped, concealed and revealed, producing a surface that records both creation and destruction. Beneath its dominant red field, traces of blue, yellow, green and white emerge only to disappear again beneath subsequent layers. At different moments, viewers may sense horizons, geological formations or atmospheric effects, despite the absence of any explicit subject matter. The painting demonstrates Richter's remarkable ability to evoke the experience of landscape without depicting landscape directly.
‘It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.’ – Claude Monet
Richter's red abstractions of 1991 represent a decisive moment in his ongoing investigation of perception and pictorial ambiguity. In Abstraktes Bild, layers of crimson are built up and disrupted through a process of scraping, revealing flashes of colour beneath the surface that suggest depth, atmosphere and fleeting traces of landscape. The painting hovers between emergence and erasure, refusing to settle into a stable image and instead demanding sustained acts of looking. While Claude Monet's late Water Lilies offer a revealing point of comparison, Richter's paintings extend this investigation into the nature of seeing itself. Rather than depicting a motif observed in the world, he constructs a space in which appearance remains fluid, shifting constantly between image, memory and sensation. Although separated by nearly a century, both artists challenge the notion of a fixed image, emphasising instead the instability of vision and the act of looking itself. Through layered colour, optical ambiguity and the dissolution of compositional hierarchy, Monet and Richter engage in a cross-generational dialogue.
The work also invites intriguing comparisons with older pictorial traditions in which absence and ambiguity play active roles in perception. The method of leaving expansive voids (liubai or leaving space) of Song dynasty landscape painting were never conceived as empty space; rather, they functioned as sites of contemplation, allowing viewers to mentally traverse the image and complete its meaning. Richter's red abstractions somehow theoretically echoed these traditions in their reliance upon the viewer's imagination.
Abstraktes Bild brings together some of the artist's most enduring exploration. The blurred photo-paintings questioned the reliability of images; the mirror works dissolved the distinction between image and reality; and the red abstractions push these inquiries into their purest form. The work embodies Richter's conviction that meaning does not reside in an image itself, but is projected onto it through memory, experience and perception. At a time when abstraction had been repeatedly challenged by Conceptual and postmodern critiques, Richter reaffirmed painting's capacity to engage profound questions of perception and meaning.