Lot 17 D

‘Vorhang’ [curtain] pertains to the famous group of works with curtain motifs that were created between 1964 and 1967. In 1964, Gerhard Richter painted a six-part portrait of the well-known gallerist Alfred Schmela (‘Portrait Schmela’, WVZ 37/1). It is the first of numerous portraits based on photographic templates. The visible curtain with its abstract quality in the background of the Schmela portrait encouraged the artist to concentrate on this element. His fascination with these structures, characterised by curves and strong contrasts of light and dark and taken from everyday life, continued after the first curtain pictures and carried on in other series of works in which he worked with corrugated sheet metal, bundles of tubes, and folded-over sheets of paper. Richter precisely studied the curves modelled by the light, in which all gradations of brightness, from intense light reflections to the deepest shadows, merge softly into one another.
The framing in this work is tight, focussing on the gentle movement of the folds in an intimate, square format.
The forms, developed purely from shades of grey, hint at the heaviness of the material despite the strong reduction of the motif; illusionism and abstraction go hand in hand, directly related to his photographic images of this period.
‘At some point I was no longer satisfied with painting copies of photos; I took the stylistic devices of the photo – accuracy, blurring, illusion – and used them to make doors, curtains, and pipes,’ the artist describes (Gerhard Richter, in: Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler, Cologne 2002, p.188).