Lot 1208. Property of a Distinguished Private Collection. Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Abstraktes Bild, oil on canvas, signed, dated 1994 and numbered 811-1 on the reverse, 250 by 200 cm. Lot Sold 84,469,000 HKD (Estimate 70,000,000 - 100,000,000 HKD). © 2023 Gerhard Richter © Sotheby's 2023

Provenance: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1996)
Christie's London, 14 February 2012, Lot 25
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner.

Literature: Exh. Cat., London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter, September - October 1998, no. 811-1, p. 89, illustrated in colour
Exh. Cat., Düsseldorf, K20 Grabbeplatz, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Gerhard Richter, February - May 2005, no. 811-1, p. 271, illustrated in colour
Judd Tully, “The Ascent of Gerhard Richter,” Art + Auction, June 2012, p. 128
Dietmar Elger, Ed., Gerhard Richter. Catalogue Raisonné 1994-2006, vol. 5 (nos. 806 – 899-8), Berlin 2019, no. 811-1, p. 87, illustrated in colour.

Exhibited: London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties, 1995, no. 23, pp. 59, 85, illustrated in colour.

Note: Shimmering with emerald greens, sapphire blues and piercing reds, Abstraktes Bild from 1994 is an iridescent masterwork from Gerhard Richter’s epic cycle of Abstraktes Bild paintings. A magnificent large-format work, Abstraktes Bild immediately recalls Monet's ground-breaking Nymphéas, and derives from a crucial period of Richter’s long celebrated career. In the early 1990s, the artist had arguably mastered his abstract practice and had been honoured with a series of landmark exhibitions, including the seminal 1991 exhibition at Tate Gallery, London, and the major touring retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993 in Bonn, 1993-1994. Indeed, this period was a time of great personal success and contentment for the artist, which many consider to be reflected in his works from this time such as Abstraktes Bild—its regal, jewel-tone palette; harmonious equilibrium of colour and line; and deft handling of paint which both soothes and excites.

himmering with emerald greens, sapphire blues and piercing reds, Abstraktes Bild from 1994 is an iridescent masterwork from Gerhard Richter’s epic cycle of Abstraktes Bild paintings. A magnificent large-format work, Abstraktes Bild immediately recalls Monet's ground-breaking Nymphéas, and derives from a crucial period of Richter’s long celebrated career. In the early 1990s, the artist had arguably mastered his abstract practice and had been honoured with a series of landmark exhibitions, including the seminal 1991 exhibition at Tate Gallery, London, and the major touring retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Malerei 1962-1993 in Bonn, 1993-1994. Indeed, this period was a time of great personal success and contentment for the artist, which many consider to be reflected in his works from this time such as Abstraktes Bild—its regal, jewel-tone palette; harmonious equilibrium of colour and line; and deft handling of paint which both soothes and excites.

Gerhard Richter’s unprecedented art of abstraction stands as the ultimate culmination to the epic journey of his career, during which he has ceaselessly interrogated the limits of representation, the nature of perception and the operations of visual cognition. Variously evoking something of Monet’s translation of his garden at Giverny, Rothko’s exuberance of transformative colour, Kline’s structural expressionism, Pollock’s instigation of autonomous composition, and de Kooning’s transferal of the figural to the abstract, Richter’s abstraction is ultimately without comparison. The present work in particular recalls the work of Monet and his Nymphéas, not only in its serene palette of green and blue with its flashes of pinks that summon the images of waterlilies and their reflections, but also in the creation of a spatially ambiguous work that shifts between figuration and abstraction.

Abstraktes Bild is an exquisite demonstration of Richter’s employment of the squeegee, which during the later 1980s became his principle and most highly valued tool with which to create abstract paintings. As the squeegee is dragged across an expanse of canvas, the pressure and speed of Richter’s application of paint ultimately surrenders to the unpredictability of chance in informing the composition. It is this separation of the artist from direct expression that bestows Richter’s paintings with their inherently natural look. The shimmering and harmoniously artful orchestration of paint within Abstraktes Bild oscillates between an act of intense evocation and a simultaneous effacement of painterly form: ingrained within the work’s destructive and unpredictable formation is a reflection of nature itself. As outlined by the scholar Beate Söntgen, Richter’s method “joins the painted traces of the tools together with the layering and intersections of colour to form structures that are figural or landscape in appearance, without ever solidifying into an object that is once again recognizable” (Beate Söntgen, ‘Work on the Picture: The Discretion of Gerhard Richter,’ in: Exh. Cat., Cologne, Museum Ludwig Cologne, Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder, 2008, p. 37).

“For Richter, the squeegee is the most important implement for integrating coincidence into his art. For years, he used it sparingly, but he came to appreciate how the structure of paint applied with a squeegee can never be completely controlled. It thus introduces a moment of surprise that often enables him to extricate himself from a creative dead-end, destroying a prior, unsatisfactory effort and opening the door to a fresh start.” —GERARD RICHTER QUOTED IN D. ELGER, GERHARD RICHTER: A LIFE IN PAINTING, CHICAGO 2009, P. 251.

Though entirely disconnected from reference in both method and conception, Richter’s abstractions nevertheless evoke natural forms and colour configurations. We cannot help but ascribe meaning to the complexity of their layered compositions. As outlined by the artist: “The paintings gain their life from our desire to recognize something in them. At every point they suggest similarities with real appearances, which then, however, never really materialize” (the artist in Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 267). The subtle layers of pigment and resonant accumulation of colour engendered by the squeegee imparts a textural surface reminiscent of myriad natural forms: sunsets, sunrises, shoals, riptides, and cresting waves—here, the evocation of a calm body of water and the reflection of flora and fauna is undeniable.

Gerhard Richter’s artistic contribution is internationally considered within the highest tier of this era; his inimitably diverse canon evidencing more than five decades of philosophical enquiry into the core natures of perception and cognition. The particularly striking aesthetics of Abstraktes Bild were produced at the height of Richter’s technical development, and the present work can be considered a superlative example of his artistic mastery.

Sotheby's. Contemporary Evening Auction. Hong Kong, 5 October 2023