Gerhard Richter’s work is a sustained investigation into painterly form; dizzying in its variety, it renegotiates relations between medium, subject and truth. Dating from 2005, the present lot belongs to a body of work initiated decades earlier in 1976. In this Abstraktes Bild series, the artist creates pieces that are at once scabrous and celestial, dragging layer upon layer of paint across his canvases using either a squeegee or a large brush. It is tempting to establish a dichotomy between the non-representationality of these works and the careful realism of his Photo Painting. However the artist himself warns against such a distinction: ‘experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting – of a landscape, for example – and an abstract painting.’ (Gerhard Richter, ‘Interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973,' Gerhard Richter: Text. Writing, Interviews, and Letters, 1961-2007, London: Thames & Hudson, 2009, p.83).

In Richter’s theorisation, painting sets the parameters of its own reality; as he puts it, ‘later you realize that you can't represent reality at all – that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.’ (Gerhard Richter, ‘Interview with Rolf Schön, 1972,’ Gerhard Richter: Text. Writing, Interviews, and Letters, 1961-2007, London: Thames & Hudson, 2009, p.59). The artist moves beyond conventional understandings of figuration and abstraction to posit a painterly practice whose truth, if it can be spoken of, is self-contained. His pieces thereby assume a curious autonomy, heightened in the Abstrakte Bilder by the unpredictability inherent in the creative process. In 894-14, this unique approach births a beguiling painterly otherworld. An impasto haze, the grey tonalities of the base palette are enlivened by the deep green at the painting’s edges. As in much of his work, Richter arrives at a compositional space possessed of its own unique and instinctive energy.