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This work by Gerhard Richter was part of a group of 38 sheets featuring the same technique that were sold by lottery to members of the Society for Modern Art in celebration of the exhibition Gerhard Richter. Abstrakte Bilder in Cologne’s Museum Ludwig in 20081. The proceeds supported the museum’s research efforts.
All of these sheets originated as part of Richter’s work in creating reverse glass paintings in oil. To remove excess colour from the processed glass plates, the artist pressed a loose page from the same Spanish architectural monograph on them, then stripped it off again as an independent artwork. One should therefore be able to find a mirror image glass painting corresponding to each sheet in this series.
In addition to his figurative, photo-realistic, or monochromatic works, the abstract images of Gerhard Richter represent an important part in the artist’s incredibly divergent oeuvre. In many cases, he experiments with entirely different techniques and pictorial concepts at the same time. Since the late 1980s, however, abstraction has dominated Richter’s painting, which focuses on powerful, interwoven colours.
The artist himself immortalised the energy of these colours in 2007 in the spectacular new window in the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral; 11,500 small squares of hand-blown antique glass create a spatial experience of overwhelming charisma.
We are grateful to Dr. Dietmar Elger for his assistance in cataloguing this sheet.
- Museum Ludwig, Cologne: Gerhard Richter. Abstrakte Bilder, October 18th, 2008 February 1st, 2009, later that year: Haus der Kunst, Munich