Holtermann Fine Art, London
Acquired directly from the above b꧃y the present owner in 1999

Exhibition Catalogue, Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Gerhard Richter, Catalogue Raisonné for the Paintings 1993-2004, 2005, no. 840-2, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the blues are deeper, richer and more vibrant, tending more towards royal blue. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is visible under ultra-violet light.
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"I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned.  This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture... I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself."

(The artist interviewed in 1990 in: Hubertus Butin, Stefan Gronert and the Dallas Museum of Art, Eds., Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 36)

Executed in 1997, the powerful colour harmony and lyrical resonance of Abstraktes Bild projects an atmosphere of density, chaos and romance. The interplay of hues and the complex coating of malleable oil are deliberately ambiguous, seeming both to reveal and conceal at the same time: the viewer is invited both to look at and through the laminas of material due to the hues being simultaneously unveiled and hidden. In a palette of indigo, raspberry, violet and shimmering silver, the colours seem to glide across the surface, enshrouding the background in a beautiful layer of tromp-l'oeil which lends the paint💟ing an intri🧔guing sense of depth.

Richter initially confronted abstract painting when he executed a group of vivacious and colourful sketches in 1976. The present work therefore stems from over two decades of investigations of various technical and aesthetic abstract possibilities. Richter's working practice for his Abstract Paintings has been described as remarkably methodical: he begins by placing a number of white primed canvases around the walls of his studio, eventually working on several of them simultaneously and re-working them until they are completely harmonised. Tracts of colour are dragged across the canvas using a squeegee, so that the various strains of malleable, semi-liquid pigment suspended in oil are fused together and smudged first into the canvas, and then layered on top of each other as the paint strata accumulate. The painting under goes multiple variations in which each new accretion brings colour and textural juxtapositions until they are completed, as Richter himself declares, "there is no more that I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with' (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 108).  This process necessitates a lengthy production as the role of time obviates the dominance of a single creative identity: Richter's abstract works become truly the summation of a creative journey, trapp♏ing in their layers the shadows of wrought experience.🎃

The relationship of the cool, flat surface of Abstraktes Bild with its mesmerising colouring with the painterly gestures and the shapes beneath is intentionally never quite certain or mappable. The diversity of Richter's approaches within a single canvas reveals the tension between his physical enjoyment of paint on the one hand and his intellectual analysis of it on the other. For Richter, the art of painting is both a deeply problematic and moral obligation. Aside from being a compulsive channel for personal expression, it is a means for him to explore the easily overlooked concepts of perception, ideology and belief through which we construct the world surrounding us. Like his photobased paintings which underline the role of pictures in understanding the fictive nature of reality, his abstract paintings similarly avoid and confront problems of representation simultaneously. They instantaneously expose their own artificiality and weaknesses, offering approximations of reality which are enigmatically familiar yet ones we can never truly comprehend. "Every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model.... Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualise a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we may nevertheless conclude exists. We attach negative names to this reality, the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have developed it in terms of substitute images like heaven and hell, gods and devils." (Gerhard Richter in Exhibition Catalogue, Documenta 7: Gerhard Richter, 1982, n.p.)

Abstraktes Bild perfectly embodies Richter's theory of Abstraction that "there is no order, everything is dissolved, [it is] more revolutionary, anarchistic' (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 108). His abstract paintings are designed to have a non-identity whereby the total deconstruction of perception – interrogating and dismantling themes of representation, illusion, communication – becomes a sublime chaos. As such they commune an emotional relationship with the viewer and become themselves experience rather than object.  As Roald Nasgaard writes, "The character of the Abstract Paintings is not their resolution but the dispersal of their elements, their co-existing contradictory expressions and moods, their opposition of promises and denials. They are complex visual events, suspended in interrogation, and "fictive models" for that reality which escapes direct address, eludes description and conceptualization, but resides inarticulate in our experience" (Roald Nasgaard in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 110).

The result of Richter's phenomenal technical aptitude has led to his reputation as one of the outstanding painters of our era.  Abstraktes Bild lays testament to his relentless technical explorations in the field of abstract art and to the painterly and intellectual elasticity unique in his work. With its sumptuous layers of colour and deliberate negation of symmetry and constructive unity, Abstraktes Bild embodies the ultimate painterly experience.