(born in Dresden in 1932)
Abstraktes Bild, 1990, signed, dated, numbered Richter 1990, 713 – 3, on the reverse, oil on canvas, 62 x 72 cm, on stretcher, (AR)

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Provenance:
European Private Collection
Literature:
Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter, catalogue raisonné, 1962 – 1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, no. 713–3, with ill.
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: catalogue raisonné, vol. 4, nºs. 652 to 805 -6, 1988 – 1994, Ostfildern, 2015, cat. no. 713 – 3, with ill.

What characterize Gerhard Richter’s work, oscillating between figurativism and abstraction, is the fact that, up until today, he has always taken a deep look into art itself. His works cannot be ascribed to precise categories since all his production is extremely complex and diversified.
By the time our Abstraktes Bild was painted in 1990, Richter had reached international success as an artist, widely admired and accredited for his devotion to painting in all its forms and his ambition to go beyond its traditional use.
Abstraktes Bild, referable to the beginning of Richter’s finest period of abstraction, intrigues the observer with its sheet of elegant grey that falls down the full length of the canvas, spaced out by the mysterious emerging of pale and delicate strips of color that seem to lay beneath the surface.

Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make‚ nothing‘ visible.
(Gerhard Richter)

To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.
(Gerhard Richter)