Gerhard Richter’s monumental Strip paintings demonstrate a vigorous and ingenious interrogation into the possibilities of painting. Richter methodically applied the technology of photography and digital editing to construct multiple distinct abstract paintings from one, and Strip (923-23) is a unique example of this meticulous system of splitting, mirroring, and recombining the divided parts of an original painting. Richter’s approach in creating his Strip paintings was exacting, beginning by dissecting a digital photograph of his 1990 work Abstract Painting 724-4 first into two vertical sections and then joining each half with its mirror image.

 

 

He repeated this process, splitting the two into four, then four into eight, and so on, until 8,190 colorful strips remained, each 8.8 mm wide. Richter then mirrored each of these vertical bands of color, stretching the varying pigmentation of each strip horizontally over a chosen length. He further dissected these resulting paintings into details that he then collaged in unique combinations to create his final works.

 

An Experimental Perspective on the Future of Painting

 

Richter’s Strip paintings are a testament to the artist’s profoundly intelligent understanding and interrogation of the medium of painting. Taking up the mantle of countless painters who came before him, Richter has created a new view of what is possible within the medium. This effort was not his first foray into the realm of rigorous and systematic experimentation. In fact, his Strip paintings are a continuation of the conversation he initiated in the 1960s with his color charts, which began as an unsystematic reference to the found images of Pop art but grew into a methodical investigation of the mathematical possibilities of color. In his 1974 painting 4096 Colours, which marked the culmination of his color chart research, Richter created a system that enabled him to represent all possible color shades in one artwork.

 

Though his procedure for creating the color chart paintings differs from his more recent endeavor to technologize his paintings in his Strip series, in both instances the artist has created a scrupulous logic by which his creative process abides, opening the work, through his detailed and analytical approach, to questions about the endless untapped potential for two-dimensional pictorial art. 

 

Richter’s project in Strip (923-23) questions the direction in which painting is headed as a medium and at the same time provides a glimpse of what possibilities exist beyond traditional hand-painted art. Richter does not believe that traditional painting is a dying art form, saying that ‘people won't stop painting, just as they won't stop making music or dancing.’ However, he is acutely aware of the potential avenues of exploration that photography and technology open up for the practice of painting, and works such as Strip (923-23) are a testament to his intuitive grasp of the new directions that painting can take as a medium.

 

Richter has incorporated photography into his paintings since the 1960s, when he first painted from photographs projected on his canvases, blurring his subjects through the process of reproduction. His engagement in the dialogue between photography and painting continued decades later when he began painting directly on photographs.Strip (923-23) marks a continuation of his interrogation of the relationship between painting and photography. Interestingly, the photographs that were the basis for his Strip paintings were taken and processed by the same company that Dusseldorf photographers Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky employed, using the same techniques to produce immensely different results.

 

Chance as Theme and Method

 “Chance is a given, unpredictable, chaotic, the basis.  And we try to control that by intervening, giving form to chance, putting it to use.”
– Gerhard Richter

Like his predecessor, Piet Mondrian, Richter plays with the balance between chance and intention, random potentiality, and direct choice. In his abstract, sparse grid canvases that speak to what he deemed the purest form of abstraction, Mondrian enacts a careful dance between random and self-determined artistic decisions. Similarly, in his Strip paintings, Richter plays with the give and take of chance and intentionality. However, Richter’s game of chance has different rules; he introduces the added variable of technology, using all of the colors available to him within his original Abstract Painting 724-4, whereas Mondrian hand paints solely with the primaries, black, and white.

 

 

Richter has famously studied how happenstance influences production with his invention of the squeegee technique, using the broad-shaped tool to scrape away impasto from his canvases and create spontaneous, abstract symphonies of form and color. Richter also experimented with random probability in his later color chart paintings, in which he arranged the color squares according to chance. Richter’s method of generating his Strip paintings was initially entirely at the mercy of probability, as each digital print represented the expansive mirroring of a random vertical strip of his original oil painting. However, in the last step of his process of breaking down and rebuilding his painting into many other iterations, Richter intervened. Rather than leave the appearance of the final work up to providence alone, he augmented his result by again bisecting the strip pieces and combining specifically chosen elements from them in collage in order to create a more visually appealing composition.
 

Collector’s Digest

•  A tremendously influential powerhouse of contemporary art, Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and came of age during a period of intense political and cultural change. Richter studied art first at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1951 and then at the Dusseldorf Academy in 1961, before embarking on a flourishing career that has spanned several decades. Continuing to explore the tensions between color, chance, abstraction, and representation, his oeuvre has made a considerable mark on art history. At age 91, Richter is known as arguably the most famous and influential living contemporary artist of his time.
• The period in which he made Strip (923-23) marked considerable successes for Richter, with solo shows at Tate Modern, London in 2011; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, in 2012 and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany in 2012 as well. More recently, in 2022 his work was shown in three exhibitions in Germany, as well as The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and this March works from the past seven years will be shown at the Zwirner gallery in New York City.