Beschreibung:

Abstraktes Bild (-)
signed, inscribed and dated “678-1 Richter 1988” on the reverse oil on canvas 38 1/4 x 36 1/4 in. (97.2 x 92.1 cm) Painted in 1988.
Glimpses of Truth Richter’s primary artistic concerns deal with the triumphs and failures of painting in the contemporary era and the capabilities of perception and representation, issues he has addressed since his early photo-paintings. All of his works confront these issues using a distinct intellectual ambivalence and a devout adherence to traditional language of painting. Richter, a reverent student of the history of art, conceptualizes the canvas using the terms first postulated by Leon Battista Alberti in the 15th Century, as a finestra aperta which offers glimpses into fictive realities. He asserts that his paintings offer indistinct views into the unassailable truths of reality, articulated in an indecipherable and incomprehensible language; they are “fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.” Claude Monet Weeping Willow, 1920-1922. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Image credit © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean "We attach negative names to this reality; the un-known, the un-graspable, the infinite, and for thousands of years we have depicted it in terms of substitute images live heaven and hell, gods and devils. With abstract painting we create a better means of approaching what can be neither seen nor understood." — Gerhard Richter In all of his experimentations with abstraction, from the semi-abstract breakthrough Tisch (Table) in 1962 to the grand, richly textured compositions of the present, Richter has forged a unique model for the relation of abstraction to its sources in the material experiences of the world. This model does not strive to achieve the traditional idealized image of an aesthetic, harmonious composition, but rather endeavors to reveal to the viewer the fundamental verities of lived experience, the imprecision, uncertainty, transience, and incompleteness of reality. A triumph among his early mature abstracts, Abstraktes Bild presents Richter’s dilemma concerning the inadequacy of representation in both formal and conceptual terms: covered in thickly applied layers of paint, the work hints at a sublime eternal truth that exists within the canvas, one that is only partially revealed in the palimpsests of pigment that hover behind vibrating striations of painterly texture. Passages of vibrant color, archaeological evidence of lower layers of color, shine through below velvet washes of black and green, alternately poured onto and scraped away from the canvas to create thick cloaks of color; Abstrakes Bild reflects this murky inexactness of perception and the grasping inadequacy of representation. In this sense, his abstract works address the same issues of truth and perception as his figurative paintings do in their nebulous renderings of found and decontextualized photographs, instead in the sublime metaphysical language of abstraction: Are painting’s efforts to represent truth futile? In our attempts to imitate truth, do we obscure it? Can truth truly be apprehended? Ever skeptical, Richter leaves these questions unanswered; instead, he presents the viewer with silent meditations on “transparency and opacity, proximity and distance, forgetting, remembering, and expecting.”iv Cut from the Archives i Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2009, p. 251. ii Gerhard Richter quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter The Daily Practice of Painting—Writings 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 159. iii Gerhard Richter quoted in Benjamin Buchloh, “Interview with Gerhard Richter ” Gerhard Richter Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1988, p. 28 iv Peter Osborne, quoted in Andre Rottman, Gerhard Richter Painting After All, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2020, p. 82.