Detail of Gerhard Richter Grün Blau Rot 789-5, 1993
"...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."
—G. Richter, 1988
Grün Blau Rot 789-5 forms part of Gerhard Richter's theoretical enquiry into the possibilities of painting and the compositional challenges of abstraction. Executed in 1993 in collaboration with Parkett Magazine, this particular work belongs to a series of 115 works, each uniquely painted in a similar format.
With a publishing house in Zurich and an additional editorial office in New York, Parkett magazine was founded in the early 1980s and has produced collaborations with such artists as Ellsworth Kelly, John Currin, James Turrell and Richard Prince, in addition to Gerhard Richter.
Adopting the use of oil-based pigments and the artist's iconic squeegee technique, the regimented process employed by Richter throughout his Abstraktes Bild series, is the aesthesis to the textural and arbitrary paint deposit. Exploring the instantaneous moment of creation, Richter's device is purposely uncontrollable via the hand of the artist and purely facilitates the application of paint, rather than the final composition. The resulting bands and smears of vibrant reds rupture as they sprawl across the canvas and gradually merge into the deep blue striations to right of the work.
Gerhard Richter Grün Blau Rot 789-5, 1993
This pull of red and blue paint across the canvas both conceals and unveils the acidic green under-paint freely and sporadically emerging throughout the surface plain. Embodying this iconic motive in Richter's oeuvre, the work from our New Now sale reflects on the artist's "reality, problems, difficulties and contradictions" in approaching the tradition of painting.
As explained by critic Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times, the canvas grants Richter infintie possibilities and potential to experiment with colour and brushstroke: "I always need to paint abstracts again," Richter admitted. “I need that pleasure.”