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Artist or Maker: Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

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Exhibited: Baden-Baden, Staättliche Kunsthalle,
Sammlung Frieder Burda: Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer
, 1996, p. 99, no. 35 (illustrated in color).

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Notes: Painted in 1992, Richter's Abstraktes Bild is one of the most powerful works of his multi-layered abstract style that the artist begain exploring in the late 1980's. In works like Abstraktes Bild 770, Richter makes regular use of squeegees to pull paint across the canvas in a regimented series of vertical stripes. The works have a paradoxically ambiguity-- they are once abstract paintings, dominated by the process of their own making, and at the same time, the hint of a horizon line at the lower edge transforms it into a magical landscape. Abstraktes Bild 770 is stylistically related to his four part Forest series from 1990, in that it recalls the density, confusion and romantic atmosphere of the forest.

The deliberate ambiguity invoked in Abstraktes Bild is intended to demonstrate that all perception is an illusion. By seemingly providing two layers of conflicting abstract reality at the same time on the surface of the picture, Richter presents a forest-like mystery where the viewer quite literally can't see the wood for the trees. Only a simultaneous view of the two demonstrably alternating layers of paint provide a complete and new picture. Playing with the surfaces of his abstracts, Richter is in effect exploring them in the same way that he explored the ambiguity of blurring in his photographic paintings of the 1960s. As with these works Richter is clearly still fascinated with surface and the insight it can provide into the mystery of what lies beneath.

As Richter has often pointed out, it is essentially only in the abstract that an approximate sense of the truly unfathomable nature of reality can be found. Abstract painting provides "a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy-- all the resources of art in fact-- in order to depict "nothing." Accustomed to pictures in which we recognize something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere color (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualisable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events, more accessible" (Gerhard Richter: Documenta 7, Kassel, 1982, reprinted in Ibid p. 100).

Abstraktes Bild 770 is made in several stages, with a softer background image overlaid with dramatic strokes and energetic gestures. Unlike most Abstract Expressionists, he is more deliberate and conceptual in his painting process. His use of the squeegee adds an element of chance and removes the artist's hand (or at least the artist's brush), in a way that would be anathema to the likes of Pollock, Kline and de Kooning. Indeed, it is the artist's intention to disrupt, or deconstruct, painting and with this to enter into a new rhetoric of the medium. "In their discontinuous narratives lies the ground for a moral dialogue between artist and audience that invites not acquiescence, but a creative and critical response to the world it depicts. Thus the heterogeneity of the work is also its truthfulness... The character of the Abstract Paintings is not their resolution but the dispersal of their elements, their coexisting contradictory expressions and moods, their opposition of promises and denials" (R. Nasgard, Gerhard Richter, Paintings, New York 1988, p. 110). With its brilliant waves of color and dynamic leaps and jumps of the spatula across the canvas, this painting is injected with an energy that is unsurpassed in works of this period.