Abdu

A vast, kaleidoscopic vision stretching nearly four metres in width, Abdu belongs to Gerhard Richter’s groundbreaking series of tapestries. Created in 2009, these four works represent an extraordinary chapter in the artist’s six-decade practice, demonstrating a bold embrace of new media in his long-running inquiry into abstraction. Woven on a jacquard loom, the tapestries are based on his 1990 painting Abstraktes Bild 724-4, which became the wellspring for a number of innovative projects during the 2000s. In each of the four works, a section of the painting is reproduced in one of the lower corners and mirrored in rotation across the remaining three quadrants of the tapestry. The result is a scintillating new pattern, structured like a mandala or Rorschach test. In Abdu, a core of blue bursts from the centre into gleaming, hallucinogenic reflections of red and gold. Spun from acrylic, wool and silk, its shimmering textures evoke the traditional handiwork of weaving even as Richter takes his work to new technical frontiers.

Abdu takes the upper left quadrant of Abstraktes Bild 724-4 as its base image: the painting’s azure corner becomes the starburst at the tapestry’s heart. The weaving captures painterly texture and colour with extraordinary precision, translating these qualities into a unique and tactile new object. For Richter, the tapestries marked a new phase in his investigation into the relationship between chance and control, previously explored through his signature squeegeed canvases. Drawing upon the artist’s much-discussed affinity with music, Francesco Bonami likens their elegant repeated structures to a Schoenberg quartet. Indeed, three examples featured as part of a joint installation project with composer Arvo Pärt at The Shed, New York, in 2019. Merging a centuries-old decorative craft with boundary-pushing abstraction, Abdu is a masterful enigma that—like so much of Richter’s art—hovers elusively between languages.

Between 2008 and 2013, as he approached his eightieth birthday, Richter undertook some of his most complex technical experiments. Taking Abstraktes Bild 724-4 as his muse, he made a number of diverse editioned works that sought to analyse various aspects of the painting’s DNA. In Sieben Zwei Vier (2008), he reproduced an out-of-focus colour photograph of the work; in Patterns (2011), he made an artist’s book documenting the various permutations that could be created by dividing the painting into different-sized vertical sections. In his four Strip works, created between 2011 and 2013, he made digital inkjet prints based on details of the painting that were fragmented and mirrored multiple times. Through these endeavours, the artist sought to extract meaning from the endless complexity of the painting’s original surface, transforming it into a series of rhythmic calculations.

The tapestries, in particular, invite comparison with the work of Alighiero Boetti, whose own textile works played with the relationship between order and chaos. With their mandala-like structure, they might also be seen to echo Boetti’s interest in mysticism. ‘The hand of the artist has disappeared to make room for the mechanics of a mystical experience’, writes Bonami. ‘In the future these tapestries may be seen not as art but as spiritual vessels with symbolic meaning, like that carried by Native American weavings. Their titles add another layer of complexity. Musa, Yusuf, Iblan, and Abdu seem to refer to Sufism and the culture of Persia and the Middle East’ (F. Bonami, ‘The Accidental Healer’, in Gerhard Richter: Tapestries, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, London 2013, p. 11). The dialogue between process and visual effect had been at the core of Richter’s practice since the 1960s: here, the artist weaves mystery and magic from the loom.