“Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject.”

—Gerhard Richter

Executed in 1990 as one of a series of 12 uniquely-painted variants, Park exemplifies Gerhard Richter’s aesthetically diverse and conceptually complex practice. Simultaneously a print, photograph and painting, the work oscillates between two and three dimensions, reality and fantasy, and visibility and obscurity. As noted by German art historian Hubertus Butin, ‘In painting editions, photographic works, prints, drawings and multiples, the artist managed to develop various ways of variegating individual works in their appearance, yet still within the context of the same production process’.ⁱ Depicting a park in Cologne, where the artist has lived and worked from the beginning of the 1980s, the present work is strongly connected to Richter’s personal environment. While the primary photographs and techniques used in creating his unique editions are repeated throughout the series, Richter introduces an element of individuality to each work by applying his distinctive squeegee technique. Here, stippled green and white paint partially cover the background image, merging with the shadows of trees in the printed image. Covering three quarters of the photograph, Richter challenges the viewer’s perception and imagination: through the blotches of paint, the lane and grass appear partly obscured, testing the interplay between the seen and unseen. By using the same technique in these works as in his abstract paintings and landscapes, Richter is seeking to form a new visual reality reflected in his radiant fragments of paint.

Unlike artists who find specific (commercial) value in the production of editions, Richter uses uniquely-worked variants of single images to contribute to his wider painting practice. In this, Richter joins fellow artists such as Sigmar Polke and Dieter Roth, who likewise deploy diverse techniques and processes to individually modify each work within an edition. Throughout his career, the artist has continued to challenge the conventional understanding of seriality with his unique editions, further broadening the scope of his explorations into reality, abstraction and perception.

ⁱ Hubertus Butin, Gerhard Richter: Unique Pieces in Series, Cologne, 2017, p. 13