Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
A striking example of his mature oeuvre, Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (940-2), 2015 encapsulates the unrelenting formal innovation that distinguishes the artist’s interrogation of truth and perception in painting. Incorporating the artist’s innovative squeegee technique that invites chance into his process, Abstraktes Bild exemplifies the masterful effects of this formal innovation, presenting the viewer with visual meditations on “transparency and opacity, proximity and distance, forgetting, remembering, and expecting.”i
Abstraktes Bild evidences Richter’s potential solution for the inadequacy of representation in both formal and conceptual terms. Seeking to reenergize painting at its critical nadir in the age of conceptual art, in the 1960s, Richter began to use a homemade squeegee to smear and scrape paint across his canvases. A counterpoint to the cult of the handcrafted, Richter’s squeegee fused mechanical control and chance to blur the lines between intention and coincidence. Layering strata of wet paint, Richter creates distinctive painterly formations in Abstraktes Bild that both melt into each other and scatter into complex fractals of vivid color. Archivist and scholar Dietmar Elger observed that Richter’s squeegee "is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start.”ii
"With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood."
—Gerhard Richter
The serendipitous effect of Richter’s idiosyncratic process partially removes the artist’s hand from each composition as he distorts the surface of the work, creating quasi-mechanical palimpsests of richly layered color. As Richter crucially pointed out, “Above all, it’s never blind chance: it’s a chance that’s always planned, but also always surprising. And I need it in order to carry on, in order to eradicate my mistakes, to destroy what I’ve worked out wrong, to introduce something different and disruptive. I’m often astonished to find how much better chance is than I am.”iii
One of Richter’s primary artistic concerns over his sixty-year career has been to reconcile the often-incongruous relationship between painting’s ability to represent and man’s capability to perceive. Like the rest of his broad oeuvre, Abstraktes Bild confronts this unhappy marriage with a distinct intellectual ambivalence and a reverent adherence to traditional language of painting. Using an abstract dialect, Richter conceptualizes of painting as Leon Battista Alberti’s finestra aperta, a window offering glimpses into fictive worlds; his canvases offer indistinct and incomplete views into the unassailable truths of reality, articulated in an indecipherable and incomprehensible language. In Richter’s words, they are “fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.” iv
In all of his experimentations with abstraction, from the early semi-abstract breakthrough Tisch (Table), 1962 to grand, richly textured compositions like Abstraktes Bild, Richter has forged a unique model for the relation of painting to its sources—literal or spiritual—in real-world experience. Rather than solely striving to achieve a traditionally idealized and harmonious composition, Richter uses the pure expression of abstraction to reveal to the viewer the fundamental verities of lived experience, its imprecision, uncertainty, and transience. Passages of vibrant color, the archaeological evidence of underpainting, shine through velvet washes of black, blue, and red that are alternately poured onto and scraped away from the canvas to create thick cloaks of color. Abstrakes Bild expresses the murky inexactness of perception and the grasping inadequacy of representation; its core truths are intimated but never fully revealed.
i Peter Osborne, quoted in Andre Rottman, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2020, p. 82.
ii Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2009, p. 251.
iii Gerhard Richter, quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting—Writings 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 159.
iv Gerhard Richter, quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist and Dietmar Elger, eds., Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interviews, and Letters 1961–2007, London, 2009, p. 121.Provenance
Wako Works of Art, Tokyo
Acquired from the above by the present ownerExhibited
Tokyo, Wako Works of Art, Gerhard Richter: Painting, November 10 – December 19, 2015, p. 64 (illustrated, p. 65; installation view illustrated, p. 15)
Literature
Gerhard Richter. Painting 1992-2017, exh. cat., Wako Works of Art, Tokyo 2017, p. 135 (illustrated)
Artist Biography
Gerhard Richter
German • 1932
Powerhouse painter Gerhard Richter has been a key player in defining the formal and ideological agenda for painting in contemporary art. His instantaneously recognizable canvases literally and figuratively blur the lines of representation and abstraction. Uninterested in classification, Richter skates between unorthodoxy and realism, much to the delight of institutions and the market alike.
Richter's color palette of potent hues is all substance and "no style," in the artist's own words. From career start in 1962, Richter developed both his photorealist and abstracted languages side-by-side, producing voraciously and evolving his artistic style in short intervals. Richter's illusory paintings find themselves on the walls of the world's most revered museums—for instance, London’s Tate Modern displays the Cage (1) – (6), 2006 paintings that were named after experimental composer John Cage and that inspired the balletic 'Rambert Event' hosted by Phillips Berkeley Square in 2016.
26
Abstraktes Bild (940-2)
signed, inscribed and dated "940-2 Richter 2015" on the reverse
oil on canvas
46 1/8 x 37 7/8 in. (117 x 96.2 cm)
Painted in 2015.
Estimate
$4,500,000 - 5,500,000
Sold for $5,112,000
Amanda Lo Iacono
Head of Auctions
New York
+1 212 940 1278
20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
New York Auction 23 June 2021
1
Cinga Samson
Two piece 1
Estimate $25,000 - 35,000
Sold for $378,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
2
Jadé Fadojutimi
Untitled
Estimate $40,000 - 60,000
Sold for $390,600
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
3
Salman Toor
Fort Greene
Estimate $100,000 - 150,000
Sold for $478,800
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
4
Avery Singer
Untitled
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $4,144,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
5
Matthew Wong
The Reader
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $2,329,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
6
Winston Churchill
The Moat, Breccles
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,845,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
7
Matthew Wong
Field in a Dream
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $2,934,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
8
Jean Dubuffet
L'homme à la toque
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,571,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
9
Emily Mae Smith
Waiting Room
Estimate $40,000 - 60,000
Sold for $756,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
10
Nicole Eisenman
Whatever Guy
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $840,700
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
11
Norman Lewis
Abstract City
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $1,119,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
12
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol
Bananas
Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Sold for $4,300,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
13
David Hockney
A Neat Lawn
Estimate $9,500,000 - 10,500,000
Sold for $11,000,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
14
Vija Celmins
Untitled (Ocean)
Estimate $5,500,000 - 6,500,000
Sold for $7,748,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
15
Carmen Herrera
Green and Orange
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,200,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
16
This lot is no longer available.
17
Brice Marden
Elements III
Estimate $3,200,000 - 3,800,000
Sold for $5,233,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
18
Amoako Boafo
Untitled
Estimate $80,000 - 120,000
Sold for $655,200
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
19
Titus Kaphar
Untitled III
Estimate $300,000 - 400,000
Sold for $1,058,500
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
20
Amy Sherald
It Made Sense...Mostly In Her Mind
Estimate $500,000 - 700,000
Sold for $3,539,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
21
Wayne Thiebaud
Winding River
Estimate $6,000,000 - 8,000,000
Sold for $9,809,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
22
Mark Rothko
Untitled
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $3,700,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
23
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Batman
Estimate $1,600,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,800,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
24
Keith Haring
Untitled (For John Sex)
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $899,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
25
Takashi Murakami
Red Demon and Blue Demon with 48 Arhats
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $6,080,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
26
Gerhard Richter
Abstraktes Bild (940-2)
Estimate $4,500,000 - 5,500,000
Sold for $5,112,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
27
Joan Mitchell
Untitled
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $3,902,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
28
Willem de Kooning
East Hampton V
Estimate $700,000 - 1,000,000
Sold for $3,055,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
29
Amy Sillman
Flower Giver
Estimate $300,000 - 400,000
Sold for $598,500
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
30
Alexander Calder
Fourteen Black Leaves
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,300,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
31
This lot is no longer available.
32
Julie Curtiss
Three Widows
Estimate $110,000 - 150,000
Sold for $466,200
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
33
Norman Rockwell
My Mother (Soldier with French Woman)
Estimate $350,000 - 500,000
Sold for $504,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
34
Richard Prince
Nurses Dormitory #3
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $1,482,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
35
Mickalene Thomas
Portrait of Jessica
Estimate $200,000 - 300,000
Sold for $1,542,500
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
36
Andy Warhol
Mao
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $3,000,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
37
Georg Baselitz
Drei Herzen (Three Hearts)
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $2,450,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
38
Carl Andre
36 Copper Square
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $2,692,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
39
Robert Rauschenberg
Untitled (Elemental Sculpture)
Estimate $250,000 - 350,000
Sold for $315,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
40
Bruce Nauman
Musical Chair
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Sold for $1,482,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
41
David Hammons
It’s Not Necessary
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $5,475,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
42
Andy Warhol
Shadow (Double)
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $877,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
43
Toyin Ojih Odutola
Quality Control
Estimate $150,000 - 200,000
Sold for $340,200
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
44
Robert Colescott
Gift of the Sea
Estimate $300,000 - 500,000
Sold for $504,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
45
Dana Schutz
Swiss Family Traveling
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $1,482,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
46
Banksy
Love Is In The Air
Estimate $1,000,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,179,500
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
47
Keith Haring
Untitled
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Sold for $1,482,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
48
Louise Bourgeois
Labyrinthine Tower
Estimate $550,000 - 750,000
Sold for $756,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
49
Paul McCarthy
White Snow Dwarf (Doc)
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000
Sold for $403,200
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.
50No Reserve
Jeff Koons
Gazing Ball (Demeter)
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000 •
Sold for $998,000
Create your first list.
Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.