Oil on paper
Dated "11.2.88" on verso and "unten" indicating the direction. Signed and dated in lower left of backing cardboard. 29,7 x 42 cm (11,6 x 16,5 in), the full sheet
According to the information from Prof. Richter, the work is executed in monotype. We are grateful for his expert advice.

PROVENANCE: Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York.
Private collection Berlin.

After his studies of painting in Dresden from 1951 to 1956 and the three years that followed as a master-class student at the Academy, Richter emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany. A large cache of early work, long believed to have been lost, dates from that period. Only a few of these works have survived. From 1961 to 1963 he studied under Karl Otto Götz at the Duesseldorf Academy of Arts. It is there that he became friends with Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and Konrad Lueg - who was later known as the art dealer Konrad Fischer - , with whom he performed the "Demonstration in favour of capitalist realism" as a German version of Pop Art in 1963. In 1962, influenced by Giacometti and Dubuffet, he started with representational paintings based on photographs. This was the result of a changed view on art, which, according to Richter, "has nothing to do with painting, composition or color". His first solo exhibitions took place in 1964 at the galleries of Heiner Friedrich in Munich and Alfred Schmela in Duesseldorf. In 1967 Richter became guest lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg and in 1971 he was offered a chair at the Academy of Arts in Duesseldorf, which he held until 1996. Further visiting professorships from the College of Art in Halifax, Canada, in 1978 and the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 1988 followed. In his alpine and urban paintings of the end of the 1960s, the photographic pattern is reflected in thickly applied spots of color. With his color field series from 1971 to 1974, in which the artist he used the four primary colors faceted and in arbitrary combinations as well as his monochrome grey paintings of 1972-1975, Richter made decisive painterly components his subject. In 1976 Richter started to do abstract pictures with colored streaks, but nevertheless returned to representationalism again and again and turned the alternation between techniques of representation and stylistic incongruity into a principle.

In the abstract works from the 1980s Richter on and off plays with figurative associations: as it is the case with this work, in which seemingly arbitrary color traces form a sort of plant landscape. Richter consciously employs the principle of coincidence in his work. "I don’t have a clear image in mind, in the end I want to create an image I had never planned. Well, this method of arbitrariness, coincidence, idea and destruction makes for some kind of image, but definitely not for one that was intended." (translation of quote after Hubertus Butin and Stefan Gronert, Gerhard Richter. Editionen 1965-2004, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, pp. 35/36). The pastose color structure shows an abstract material-based treatment of the color, so that the result always references the process of creation. Gerhard Richter attains a new form of abstract painting at a time when abstract ways of expression seemed to have been exhausted. He creates pictures with their own potential for visual experience.

In 1997 his "Atlas" - a systematic collection of photographs and painted sketches - was exhibited a the documenta X in Kassel. Today Gerhard Richter is regarded as one of the internationally best known and most successful contemporary artists, whose works are appreciated by a wide audience on numerous exhibitions. [SM].