Beschreibung:

Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild 825-9 1995 oil on canvas 20 3/8 x 24 3/8 in. (51.8 x 61.9 cm.) Signed, numbered and dated "Richter 1995 825-9" on the reverse.
Provenance Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York Galerie Leu, Munich Private Collection, Germany Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Day Auction, June 29, 2010, lot 230 Private Collection Gagosian Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Nîmes, France, Carré d'Art, Museé d'Art Contemporain de Nîmes, Gerhard Richter - 100 Bilder, June 15 – September 15, 1996 New York, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Gerhard Richter Works on Paper, Photographs, Editions, January 28 – March 22, 2005 Munich, Galerie Leu, Kusama – Chamberlain – Richter, April 23 – May 30, 2009 Literature M. Hentschel, H. Friedel, Gerhard Richter Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, 1998, p. 105, p. 92 (illustrated) H. Ulrich Obrist, B. Pelzer, G. Tosatto, Gerhard Richter 100 Pictures, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1996, p. 77 (illustrated) A. Zweite, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné for the Paintings 1993-2004, Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, New York: D.A.P Distributed Art Publishers, 2005, no. 825-9 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “Perhaps because I’m a bit uncertain, a bit volatile...I’d always been fascinated by abstraction. It’s so mysterious, like an unknown land.” GERHARD RIHCTER, 2011 Gerhard Richter’s reputation as the most virtuosic painter working today is founded on an astoundingly vast oeuvre that spans five decades. Having risen to esteem during the 1960s Richter has never wavered in his steadfast commitment to startling innovation of technique. The extensive variety of his ongoing artistic production has allowed him to master the fundamental principles of his medium. In this present lot, Richter has decisively selected a moody palette of tones that are set against luminous, more delicate shades of violet, which bleed into volcanic reds, softer pink, orange and yellow hues. For a purely “abstract” picture, the artist’s choice of color leaves more than a suggestion of a golden, summer twilight. It is precisely this infinite potential for disparate interpretation that renders the work as a notable achievement in subjectivity. Abstraktes Bild, which simply translates from German to Abstract Painting, exemplifies the pivotal moment in 1976 when the artist consciously abandoned figurative practice in what constituted a dramatic departure from his previous works. The artist defines, “abstract paintings [as] fictitious models… which we can neither see nor describe, but which we may nevertheless conclude exist.” (Gerhard Richter in Gerhard Richter Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1988, p. 107). Richter has since returned in his work to his own archive of creative production, continually referring to and assembling techniques with heightened self-awareness, oscillating between Abstract painting and naturalistic form, continually exploring the limits and uncertainties of the twin poles of contemporary image making: representation and abstraction. Initially, for the Abstraktes Bild series, often referred to as ‘Soft Abstracts,’ Richter conceived of a blown-up image relating to the experience of inspecting the surface of a painting in minute detail, as through a magnifying glass. The artist took enlarged photographs of variously coloured brushstrokes, projected and copied them onto each canvas, resulting in an impression of complete abstraction. The effect of the blown-up image in Abstraktes Bild is not simply an increase in size, but a transformation in the identity of the initial image and the resulting impact on the viewer. He suggests the objective of the enlargement in a letter to Benjamin Buchloh: “The outsize Blown-Up, which allows you to cheat, is for the time being the only form that can make real and comprehensible the ‘message’ that I want to present as fascinatingly as possible.” (M. Godfrey, N. Serota, ed., Gerhard Richter | Panorama, p. 126). At the execution date of Abstraktes Bild, 1995, the artist had ceased to use photographs as a point of reference, reducing these latter