.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A staggering interface between painting and technology, the present work stems from Gerhard Richter’s pioneering series of Strip Paintings. Executed in 2012, the year after the series began, it is the result of a near-forensic enquiry into the chromatic structure of one of the artist’s favourite paintings: Abstraktes Bild (724-4) from 1990. The original canvas was created at the height of Richter’s engagement with the squeegee: a tool that created marbled, unpredictable patterns and colour formations when dragged across layers of wet paint. For his Strip Paintings, the artist made a digital replica of the painting which he then divided into vertical strips and stretched horizontally. Stratified like a geological cross-section, the results transform the chaos of the original painting into a vision of order and clarity: here, the work’s seemingly impenetrable mass of colour and texture is distilled into a clean spectrum of pink and red tones, interspersed with jewel-like hues of yellow, purple, green and blue. Despite its digital process, Richter conceives the work as a painting, marking a thrilling new chapter in his six-decade-long exploration of the medium. Other examples from the series are held in institutions including Tate, London, the Albertina, Vienna, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek and the National Museum of Art, Osaka.
The Strip Paintings form part of a wider set of enquiries that Richter undertook over a five year period, each using the same original painting as its muse. The first was simply an out-of-focus colour photograph of the work created in 2008, entitled Sieben Zwei Vier after the work’s catalogue number. Having distanced himself from its painterly qualities, the following year Richter translated the work into a set of four tapestries, each based on a single quadrant of the work which the artist rotated four times to create a new pattern. In 2011, he began research for the Strip Paintings, rigorously documenting the various permutations that could be created by dividing the work into vertical sections of different sizes: the results—numbering 8190 possible combinations—were documented in his artist’s book Patterns. To create the present work, Richter selected a particular cross section which he then stretched horizontally to a width of two-and-a-half metres. In this way, the artist reintroduces something of the original painting’s dynamics, offering a digital equivalent to the lateral sweep of the squeegee. Just like the latter, which transformed base materials into mercurial, otherworldly visions, the present work takes leave of its status as a calculated sample, becoming a resonant plane of light, rhythm and harmony.
On one hand, the analytical nature of Richter’s project invites comparison with the work of artists such as Georges Seurat, Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly and Josef Albers, all of whom dug deep into the complexities of the chromatic spectrum. Where these figures were entranced by questions of human perception, however, Richter’s Strip Paintings are more closely committed to expanding the definition of painting, aligning conceptually with the work of artists such as Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool. Since the inception of his practice, Richter had sought a broad understanding of the medium. From his early Photo Paintings of the 1960s, to his Colour Charts and Grey Paintings of the 1970s and his Abstraktes Bilder of the 1980s and ’90s, he had proposed that painting was an act with no discernible end. In every figurative canvas lay the seeds of an abstract one; behind every scrambled, textured surface lay a set of discrete colours and forms. Logic and chaos fed off one another in a never-ending cycle; far from being dead, as many at the time had suggested, painting was eternally regenerative. In the Strip Paintings, and their related works, Richter’s use of technology lends new substance to this thesis, revealing the seemingly limitless range of possibilities latent in just one painterly surface.
The Strip Paintings form part of a wider set of enquiries that Richter undertook over a five year period, each using the same original painting as its muse. The first was simply an out-of-focus colour photograph of the work created in 2008, entitled Sieben Zwei Vier after the work’s catalogue number. Having distanced himself from its painterly qualities, the following year Richter translated the work into a set of four tapestries, each based on a single quadrant of the work which the artist rotated four times to create a new pattern. In 2011, he began research for the Strip Paintings, rigorously documenting the various permutations that could be created by dividing the work into vertical sections of different sizes: the results—numbering 8190 possible combinations—were documented in his artist’s book Patterns. To create the present work, Richter selected a particular cross section which he then stretched horizontally to a width of two-and-a-half metres. In this way, the artist reintroduces something of the original painting’s dynamics, offering a digital equivalent to the lateral sweep of the squeegee. Just like the latter, which transformed base materials into mercurial, otherworldly visions, the present work takes leave of its status as a calculated sample, becoming a resonant plane of light, rhythm and harmony.
On one hand, the analytical nature of Richter’s project invites comparison with the work of artists such as Georges Seurat, Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly and Josef Albers, all of whom dug deep into the complexities of the chromatic spectrum. Where these figures were entranced by questions of human perception, however, Richter’s Strip Paintings are more closely committed to expanding the definition of painting, aligning conceptually with the work of artists such as Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool. Since the inception of his practice, Richter had sought a broad understanding of the medium. From his early Photo Paintings of the 1960s, to his Colour Charts and Grey Paintings of the 1970s and his Abstraktes Bilder of the 1980s and ’90s, he had proposed that painting was an act with no discernible end. In every figurative canvas lay the seeds of an abstract one; behind every scrambled, textured surface lay a set of discrete colours and forms. Logic and chaos fed off one another in a never-ending cycle; far from being dead, as many at the time had suggested, painting was eternally regenerative. In the Strip Paintings, and their related works, Richter’s use of technology lends new substance to this thesis, revealing the seemingly limitless range of possibilities latent in just one painterly surface.