Gerhard Richter - Photographs New York Wednesday, April 6, 2022 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York
    Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich
    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Strictly speaking, all of Richter’s interventions are non-figurative. They all resemble an abstract painting that finds its home inside the photo’s rectangle. The painted gestures, however, generate a host of meaningful associations that play with or against the image that lies beneath.” Siri Hustvedt

    In 1989 Gerhard Richter began his overpainted photographs series as a means of exploring the tension between painting and photography. This image, taken in April of that year, is one of the earliest prints from this body of work. With the heavy application of paint applied to a photograph of snow-topped mountains, Richter immediately disrupts the depth of field and brings a heightened awareness to the surface quality of the photograph and paint, alike.

  • 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. 

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67

4.3.89

1989
Hand-applied oil paint on chromogenic print, unique.
3 7/8 x 5 3/4 in. (9.8 x 14.6 cm)
Signed and dated in ink on the recto.

Estimate
$20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for $44,100

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com


Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 6 April 2022