Lot 50 D

In his abstract works, Gerhard Richter consciously restrains his artist personality and works with the principle of chance. The use of a squeegee for the application of paint onto the painting support lends the creative process an unpredictable component. By renouncing his own brush style, the artist achieves a considerable de-individualisation. “I just don’t have a specific image in my mind’s eye, but am striving to achieve a painting that I haven’t planned at all. So, this method of working with arbitrariness, coincidence, inspiration and destruction does indeed produce a certain picture type, but never a pre-determined painting. […] I would like to end up with something more interesting than what I can devise.” (Gerhard Richter, cited in: Gerhard Richter. Unikate in Serie, Cologne 2017, p.132).
The series of unique works titled “Grün–Blau–Rot” that Gerhard Richter created for the Swiss art magazine “Parkett” in 1993 shows the variety which this process has already achieved, even when using only three colours. Over a surface that he has entirely covered with green, he uses a squeegee to apply dark blue and finally bright red. With this method, each of the paintings obtains a completely independent character. Opacity and transparency also vary, as do the contours and contrasts of the colours. Our painting has colour gradients gently blending into one another; the underlying green is only visible in some narrow sections. The red, applied in a pure and dense manner in the centre of the picture, creates a three-dimensional effect and seems to bulge into the foreground.