Abstraktes Bild (784 / 1-120)

Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild consists of 120 small paintings which together comprise one large, wall-filling work. The small canvases are arranged into a block six canvases high and twenty canvases wide. The narrow spaces between them form a tight pattern of parallel bands that crisscross the work – a spatial arrangement that is more or less repeated in the paintings themselves. Red stripes form an eye-catching grid atop white, green and blue fields of colour. While each element in the work is unique, the overall impression is of a cohesive whole with a clear rhythm of form and colour.

Abstraktes Bild brings together several important aspects of Richter’s work. Between 1968 and 1976, he made a series of monochrome grey paintings, the Graue Bilder, with which he seemingly reduced painting to its absolute zero point and appeared to reject any sign of the artist’s hand. Yet on closer inspection, these paintings do bear the physical characteristics of his work: the movement of the brush, the nuances of the light, the raised relief of the paint film and the lack of a focal point.

These characteristics are found in Abstraktes Bild as well. After Richter applied the paint to the individual works, he scraped some of it off again, revealing the various layers of colour. This scraping was carried out quite neatly and yielded a grid of horizontal and vertical bands of colour that stretches across the 120 canvases. You can clearly see the sharp indent where he started each stroke and where the sweeping motion of the scraping occurred. It is these traces that depict the action of painting. 

The result is an orderly and cohesive whole; yet at the same time, the colours merge together in random and unpredictable ways, having dried in a playful pattern of colour fields. The paint film has become a vast panorama of colour and movement. The expressive nature of the painterly action and colour are literally confined by the neat, repetitive rhythm.