Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Ohne Titel. Christie's Images Ltd 2012

signed, titled, dated and dedicated '(Studie zu 452) für Wolfgang Schwartz - Richter, 1979' (on the reverse); oil on canvas; 79 x 59 3/8in. (200.6 x 151cm.). Painted in 1979. Estimate £600,000 - £800,000

Provenance: Wolfgang Schwartz, Essen (acquired directly from the artist).

His sale, Sotheby's New York, 12 November 2002, Lot 28.

Private Collection (acquired at the above sale).

Anon. sale, Sotheby's London, 27 February 2008, Lot 32. 

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner. 

Literature: J. Harten and D. Elger (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, no. 452-B (illustrated, p. 226).  

B. Buchloh (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, no. 452-B (illustrated in colour, unpaged).

Notes: 'The Striche ['Strokes'] contradict painting (both as design and as image), because a brushstroke of 1m or even 20m is more a negation or deletion of painting than an element of painting. (The element of painting is the common small stroke used in connection with many other strokes. Seen this way, a stroke made with a pencil is not a stroke, but a line - and the smooth stroke of a brush a streak). Here my stroke is a stroke, and yet it is a painting. And painting as a method is not painting; it just looks that way from a distance (similar to a reproduction or to cinema projection)' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 116).

Standing at an impressive two metres in height, Gerhard Richters Ohne Titel straddles the realms of figuration and abstraction and throws into question the entire nature of painting itself. This rare picture is, alongside a similar, smaller, blue painting, one of only two canvases that relate to the Striche, two brushstrokes that are 1.9 metres in height and which stretch 20 metres in length which Richter painted for a specific public space, the foyer of the Börde-Berufskolleg, a vocational college in Soest. Ohne Titel and its smaller blue sister picture, which were shown alongside the Striche in a dedicated exhibition upon completion in 1980, are the only other canvases relating to this important project, of which Richter would later say, 'it is at any rate a work that means a lot to me... Certainly no prior work demanded as much effort and time to produce as the strokes - it took almost an entire year' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, E.M. Solaro (trans.), Chicago & London 2009, p. 249). That duration explains why Ohne Titel was painted in 1979 while the longer version which was destined for the foyer at the college was created the following year.

Ohne Titel shows a brushstroke, magnified to a point almost beyond recognition. There is a conceptual elegance to this concept: the brushstroke has been depicted through the use of brushstrokes. Crucially, on close inspection, the picture dissolves into a range of blurred forms which resemble blood viewed under a microscope, while when looking even closer the brushwork becomes visible. It is only from afar that the large 'stroke' itself comes into view, at the cost of the smaller ones which are subjugated by the overall design. Richter has equated this effect to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, by which either the position or speed of a subatomic particle can be known at one time but not both (see ibid., p. 249). 'The big Itrokes are first of all only reproductions of brushstrokes, that is, manifestations of their outward semblance,' Richter has said of these paradoxical works. 'But even the semblance is called in question, firstly because it is not painted in a deceptively real way, and secondly because there can be no such thing as a truly credible semblance, for the simple reason that such big brushstrokes cannot really exist. But the pictures do show a brushstroke, though they neither display it as a real object, nor represent it stylistically, nor manifest it illusionistically in the trompe-l'oeil sense' (G. Richter quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 119).

In the Itriche such as Ohne Titel, Richter wa returning to a device which he had used a decade earlier in his Ausschnitt, or 'detail', paintings. There, he had taken photographs of tiny sections of either his palette or the surface of paintings and had magnified them so that they became swirling abstractions. To create Ohne Titel and its sister pictures, Richter painted a single brushstroke onto a piece of cardboard a metre wide; he then photographed this and projected it onto the various large-scale canvases, tracing out the marks with charcoal before painstakingly filling them in, adding the blurring which creates such a phenomenal ambiguity.

In terms of artistic process, Ohne Titel can be seen as a continuation of Richters soft abstract paintings of the late 1970s; at the same time, this picture and the Striche in Soest prefigured the emphatic brushstrokes and dragged squeegee marks which would come to dominate the Abstracts with which Richter broke onto the international scene during the 1980s. Those pictures chimed with the Neo- Expressionism that was at that point on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic; however, Ihne Titel demonstrates precisely how distant Richter's pictures were to those contemporary images. The frenzy of their execution may be hinted at by the hot colours and apparent abstraction of Ohne Titel, yet seen in proximity, it becomes clear that this picture is in fact the result of a long and incredibly precise exercise in controlled craftsmanship. Remaining resolutely rooted in figuration, Ohne Titel deliberately invokes the visual language of older Abstract Expressionism as well - the yellow bar in the centre recalls the window-like colour forms of Mark Rothkos pictures, while the flecks of paint which have appeared here represented as blurred amoeba-like forms on the surface recall in particular Sam Francis vigorous artistic process in creating his masterpiece Big Red, which has been in the collection Museum of Modern Art, New York since the late 1950s and which Richter may well have seen during one of his visits. In a direct challenge to both the techniques and the ethos embraced by the Abstract Expressionists and Neo-Expressionists alike, Richter has displayed meticulous, time-consuming effort that in creating the inscrutable surface of Ohne Titel. In this way, he manages to cynically deconstruct painting while continuing to show his devotion to its practice.

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction. 14 February 2012. London, King Street www.christies.com