Pulsating with solar energy, Abstraktes Bild, 1994, is a stunning example of Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting series, which the artist commenced in 1977 and continued working on vigorously throughout his career. Dominated by a near-fluorescent expanse of yellow that lets discrete stabs of colour appear throughout, the present work demonstrates Richter’s unwavering interest in the intersection of colour and structure as a realm of extended possibilities. The horizontal swathes of paint, varying in density and opacity, conjure the vision of an illuminated and highly saturated landscape. Executed with Richter’s trademark tool - the squeegee - these luminous tides are serendipitously distributed throughout the surface, allowing for passages of translucence to emerge. Beginning to use the squeegee in the mid-1980s, Richter declared that he had been ‘unable to do anything in [his] painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again’ since, signifying the importance of the new-found technique within his practice and oeuvre (Gerhard Richter, quoted in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, Cambridge, 1995, p. 242). A stunning and lavishly chromatic example from the artist’s Abstract Paintings, the present composition is exemplary of Richter’s unparalleled skill as a colourist.
Chance within Richter’s Abstract Paintings takes on paramount importance, guiding the artist’s decisions throughout the works’ incremental process of creation. ‘When I paint an abstract picture, I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there’, he wrote. ‘Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings – like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful’ (Gerhard Richter, quoted in ‘Notes’, 1985, Gerhard Richter: Text. Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 142). Encapsulating Richter’s animated process defined by trust, repetition, and persistence, Abstraktes Bild displays the progressive meanderings that the artist has gone through whilst working on the canvas, ultimately amounting to an irrepressibly dynamic result, redolent of the energy deployed in Abstract Expressionist canvases. With its vigorous yellow hue and its elements of striation, Abstraktes Bild recalls Clyfford Still’s PH-1074 from 1956-59, which today resides in the artist’s museum in Colorado.
Moving past the paintings’ eponymously established abstract nature, Richter has elucidated that his Abstract Paintings were, in his eyes, evocative of reality to the point of phenomenological sentience. ‘Almost all the abstract paintings show scenarios, surroundings and landscapes that don't exist, but they create the impression that they could exist’, he exclaimed. ‘As though they were photographs of scenarios and regions that had never yet been seen’ (Gerhard Richter, quoted in 'I Have Nothing to Say and I'm Saying It: Conversations between Gerhard Richter and Nicholas Serota', Gerhard Richter Panorama, London, 2011, p. 19). With the present work, Richter brings to mind a number of objects endowed with the composition’s constitutive hue, most convincingly the sun that shines on the earth and all its perceptive beings.
