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Descriptif du lot
Acquired by Barbara and Thomas F. Eagleton from Marian Goodman Gallery soon after their creation in 1991, 14. Jan. 91 and 15. Jan. 91 are vibrant examples of Gerhard Richter’s watercolour practice. Watercolours have punctuated Richter’s oil painting activity sporadically since the late 1970s, and represent a free-flowing and richly exploratory aspect of his oeuvre. The present two works exhibit near-fluorescent surfaces of primary colour, with webs and ripples of red, blue and yellow mingling in liquid, metamorphic layers. The addition of gouache, and of a gum binder to the watercolour media, creates an interplay between bright matt pigments and pools of glistening texture. Richter would make pictures like these in series, working on eight to twelve adjacent watercolour pads at once over a period of several days.
Richter first made concerted use of watercolour in 1977-1978, when he painted small ‘sketches’ as models for his early Abstrakte Bilder, blowing up details from these compositions to form large-scale oil paintings. He made watercolours in a hotel room in Davos during the same period, which appear like miniatures or studies for imagined future pictures. These works were often executed on cheap writing or graph paper as a way to undercut what Richter called ‘a certain watercolour aesthetic, the arts-and-crafts preciousness.’ He withheld them from view until an exhibition in Cologne in 1984. He began to work on watercolour pads that same year, having come to recognise the medium’s parallel significance to his oil paintings. The watercolours dealt, he realised, with ‘the same sort of problem, but with different means … like a poem and a novel by the same author’ (in conversation with D. Schwarz, 1999, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, pp. 334, 341).
Like Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder, where layers of oil paint were scraped and marbled together using a squeegee, the watercolours’ facture reflected a dialogue between chance and control. Richter sought to make works where something unpredictable arose, beyond that which he was able to conceive. With their small scale and fluid qualities, the watercolours allowed things to emerge that were denied to the paintings. They invited a freer process, a loosening of material inhibitions. Richter explained that ‘in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits … It has an effect similar to my earlier enthusiasm for developing photos in the darkroom. Something is created there all by itself, which one only has to observe in order to intervene at the right moment—in that case, to stop it’ (ibid., pp. 341-342).
This playful aspect is all the more marked in early-1990s watercolours such as the present, which—in direct contrast to the largely austere, abraded and often almost monochrome Abstrakte Bilder of the same period—summon lively, poetic visual associations. ‘[W]hat I find very beautiful’, Richter said, ‘is that these watercolours have so many stories to tell—almost as in a fairytale, one can recognise figures, battling serpents, red giants, boulders and clouds...’ (ibid., p. 346). These ‘higher’ representational echoes arose only after the fact. Unlike those that he would identify and obliterate during his working process, Richter did not deny but even welcomed their presence.
Richter first made concerted use of watercolour in 1977-1978, when he painted small ‘sketches’ as models for his early Abstrakte Bilder, blowing up details from these compositions to form large-scale oil paintings. He made watercolours in a hotel room in Davos during the same period, which appear like miniatures or studies for imagined future pictures. These works were often executed on cheap writing or graph paper as a way to undercut what Richter called ‘a certain watercolour aesthetic, the arts-and-crafts preciousness.’ He withheld them from view until an exhibition in Cologne in 1984. He began to work on watercolour pads that same year, having come to recognise the medium’s parallel significance to his oil paintings. The watercolours dealt, he realised, with ‘the same sort of problem, but with different means … like a poem and a novel by the same author’ (in conversation with D. Schwarz, 1999, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, pp. 334, 341).
Like Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder, where layers of oil paint were scraped and marbled together using a squeegee, the watercolours’ facture reflected a dialogue between chance and control. Richter sought to make works where something unpredictable arose, beyond that which he was able to conceive. With their small scale and fluid qualities, the watercolours allowed things to emerge that were denied to the paintings. They invited a freer process, a loosening of material inhibitions. Richter explained that ‘in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits … It has an effect similar to my earlier enthusiasm for developing photos in the darkroom. Something is created there all by itself, which one only has to observe in order to intervene at the right moment—in that case, to stop it’ (ibid., pp. 341-342).
This playful aspect is all the more marked in early-1990s watercolours such as the present, which—in direct contrast to the largely austere, abraded and often almost monochrome Abstrakte Bilder of the same period—summon lively, poetic visual associations. ‘[W]hat I find very beautiful’, Richter said, ‘is that these watercolours have so many stories to tell—almost as in a fairytale, one can recognise figures, battling serpents, red giants, boulders and clouds...’ (ibid., p. 346). These ‘higher’ representational echoes arose only after the fact. Unlike those that he would identify and obliterate during his working process, Richter did not deny but even welcomed their presence.