Lot 1070. Gerhard Richter (B.1932), Abstraktes Bild, signed, numbered 607-1 and dated 1986 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 70.5 by 100.3 cm; 27⅞ by 39½ in. Estimate 17,000,000 — 25,000,000 HKD (1,770,227 - 2,603,275 EUR). Lot Sold 20,520,000 HKD (2,124,322 EUR). © Sotheby's 2018

Provenance: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Christie's, New York, 19 November 1992, lot 171
Jason Rubell Gallery, Palm Beach
Christie's, London, 22 April 1998, lot 33
Private European Collection

Literature: Acquired by the present owner from the above.Exh. Cat., Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Gerhard Richter. Werkübersicht / Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1993, Vol. III, 1993, n.p., no. 607-1 (illustrated in colour)
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné 1976-1987, Volume 3, Ostfildern, 2011, p. 524, no. 607-1 (illustrated in colour).

Abstraktes Bild
Gerhard Richter

Vividly coloured and richly luminous in radiant hues, Abstrakes Bild is the first in Gerhard Richter’s three-part series of abstract paintings numbered 607. Painted in 1986, Abstraktes Bild hails from the artist's most iconic body of work – The Abstrakte Bilder or Abstract Paintings – which originated in 1976. While the first abstract paintings of the late 1970s were based on enlarged photographic details of brushstrokes, Richter eventually ‘freed’ himself from the photographic source emancipating his creations from their own author. The Abstrakte Bilder of the 1980s show Richter arriving to his best creative moment – the painter had already found the language that he would use to produce some of the most well-known artworks of the twenty-first century. 

It was in 1980 that Richter first used the squeegee in a painting which he numbered 456-1. This new tool allowed him to spread the paint over the canvas while removing it at the same time, creating textured surfaces of wonderful colour. This is the case for Abstraktes Bild, in which vibrant oranges and yellows merge with a deep, rich jewel-green to form thick impastoed areas that contrast gracefully with the parts of the canvas where the squeegee has swept the paint away. 

Gerhard Richter in his studio in 1989 © Christopher Felver/CORBIS © Gerhard Richter, 2018

When working on his Abstrakte Bilder Richter allows for some time to pass between the application of each layer of paint. The paintings undergo endless variations in which, with each new gesture the artist adds or scrapes off colour, juxtaposing textures until a harmonious equilibrium is reached. While the strokes of the squeegee have a spontaneous nature, the overlaid works are however thoroughly thought through. Richter refers to his modus operandi as “never blind chance: it’s a chance that is 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” (the artist in conversation with Benjamin H. D. Buchloch in 1986, Gerhard Richter: Text, Cologne 2009, p. 182). Like a composer working on a symphony, Richter contemplates, pauses, and “listens” until his lyrical compositions are finished. Abstraktes Bild is, indeed, full of rhythm. The vigorous colours and expressive, gestural marks could well make it the painterly expression of an allegro. It is by music that Richter is many times inspired – if not by listening to it when painting, at least when thinking of himself as making “constant efforts to create a structure in mutual terms and a varied instrumentation” (Ibid., p. 163). 

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, Mediation, 1986, Musée des Beaux-arts, Montréal © Gerhard Richter 2018 (0056)

Although Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Paintings do not reference reality, it is inevitable that we try and find forms that resemble reality in it, perhaps following our own desire to find something recognisable. The deep greens and rich oranges aliken Abstraktes Bild to a sunset over a green landscape – the strata of paint reminding us of the different shadows and volumes created by the rays of a sun that disappears behind them. In a series of works that precede Abstraktes Bild, Richter did in fact explore this possible relationship between his landscapes and abstract works. The paintings, created between 1983 and 1984 and numbered between 549 and 559 were shown in the exhibition From Here: Two Months of New German Art in Düsseldorf and Munich, curated in 1984 by Kaspar König and which precipitated Richter’s breakthrough into the international art market. Abstraktes Bild was painted two years later, at the moment when the artist had already reached his maturity as a painter, and at a moment when he could allow himself to grow in innovation, resulting in his ground-breaking abstract painting technique. 

A masterpiece of intimate proportions, Abstraktes Bild delivers a superlative balance between illusion and allusion, erasure and construction, veiling and revealing. As part of Richter’s cumulative inquiry into representation and abstraction in paint as marked by our media saturated contemporary age, the Abstract Paintings are positioned at the vanguard of this continuing project. In his text for the VII documenta catalogue of 1982, Richter already declared his intention when painting the Abstrakte Bilder: “When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate” (Gerhard Richter, ‘Text for the documenta VII catalogue, Kassel 1982’, Gerhard Richter: Text, Cologne 2009, p. 121).