Untitled (1.3.94)
  • Gerhard Richter
  • Dresden 1932 - lives in Cologne
  • Untitled (1.3.94), 1994
  • Oil on paper
  • dated and signed middle left: 1.3.94 Richter
  • 210 × 297 mm
Provenance:
Gallery Schönwald and Beuse, Krefeld
Private collection, Mannheim
Private collection, Cologne
Literature:
Expertise Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden 2013

Richter studied from 1951-56 at the Art Academy in Dresden, where he was later able to continue working as a master student. During those same years, he also executed his first large-scale wall paintings in public spaces, for instance in the Academy’s cafeteria and in the Hygiene Museum in Dresden. These works were painted over, however, after his escape to the West in February 1961. In total, only a few pictures from this early creative period remain intact, likely also due in part to the artist’s own destruction of his works.

Gerhard Richter continued his studies at the Academy in Düsseldorf until 1964. In 1971, he was appointed as professor of painting in the same university, and he held this teaching post until 1993. In the late 1960s, prestigious galleries both at home and abroad began to pay attention to Richter’s works. His participation in the German presentation at the Venice Biennale in 1972 (48 Portraits) and additional exhibitions in New York, Brussels, Düsseldorf, and Paris spurred on his international career. Since the 1990s, if not earlier, Gerhard Richter has been established as one of the most important representatives of contemporary art.

Among the prominent exhibitions after 2000, we may count the 2002 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the opening of the Gerhard Richter Rooms in the Albertinum in Dresden in 2004, and the monumental show of 2011/12 at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, that travelled to the New National Gallery in Berlin, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The present sheet is a typical example of Richter’s form of absolute abstraction. The impasto brushstroke is blurred out of focus through the use of a squeegee, which complicates the effects of each individual application of colour and blends them all together. Richter knowingly leaves his work to a certain degree to chance.

Dr. Dietmar Elger, Director of the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden, which was established in 2005, evaluated and certified this work in 2013.