Lot 20 D

“For me, grey is the welcome and only possible analogy of indifference, of the refusal to testify, lack of opinion, formlessness. But because grey, just like formlessness and so on, can only be an idea, I can only create a colour that purports to be grey, but isn’t. The image is thus a mixture of grey as fiction and grey as a visibly proportionate colour area.” (G. Richter, Brief an Edy de Wilde, 23.2.1975, quoted from Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler, Cologne 2002, p.272)
The present painting ‘Grau’ (1970) by Gerhard Richter belongs to his core series of ‘Graue Bilder’ (1968-1976) which mark a pivotal point in his artistic development. His photographic pictures of the 1960s were already characterised by a tonal restraint founded in their source material of black and white photographs. The abstract, monochrome works grew from a phase in which Richter was searching for new forms of expression. The start of the work series resulted from the attempt to overpaint works the artist considered unsuccessful in a destructively re-creative process. In doing so, Richter experimented with mixing black, white, brown and blue to produce differentiated nuances of grey which he applied with brush, palette knife or roller.
The ‘Graue Bilder’ differ from one another through the surface qualities determined by their brushwork, as well as their shades of grey. The present work exhibits a moving surface character which finds its correlation in the changing nuances of the grey. The painting was presented in the visionary first exhibition of his work which took place in 1974-75 in the museum in Mönchengladbach and was exclusively dedicated to the presentation of the ‘Graue Bilder’.
For Richter, grey incorporates a particular ambivalence: It is neither visible nor invisible but enables – similarly to photography – the ‘nothing’ to be made visible: Richter’s grey is the distancing from the pathos of modern monochromy, its search for (idealistic or materialistic) essence. His monochromy is conceived not from the perspective of colour, but from the figure; he does not stage the colour, but rather the disappearance of the figure.” (Julia Friedrich, Grau ohne Grund, Gerhard Richters Monochromien als Herausforderungen der künstlerischen Avantgarde, Cologne 2009, p.9)