Richter's “Abstract Paintings” – The painterly completion of a life's work
“At some point, it simply comes to an end,” are the unpretentious words Gerhard Richter used to announce the end of his painting career in 2020. Richter decided that his oeuvre, characterized above all by his accomplished use of the squeegee, has officially reached its completion. “That's not so bad. And I'm old enough now.” (Quoted from: Zeit Online, September 22, 2020) As painting with the squeegee—the large, spatula-like paint scraper—had become too strenuous, Richter plans to focus solely on smaller works on paper. Anyone who has seen Corinna Belz's 2011 documentary “Gerhard Richter Painting” about the undisputed superstar of the international art scene will never forget the scenes captured in his studio, which show a highly concentrated creative process with an almost silent choreography that seems to follow an unpredictable script written in the artist's mind. Each step of the process is premeditated with utmost precision, even if the result —the highly individual color streaks — is largely unpredictable and therefore the product of calculated chance.

The legendary “Abstract Paintings” are a testament to Richter's unique artistic signature —a perfect, ever-fascinating balance of meticulous planning and chance. Richter's radical artistic break with tradition was bold and uncompromising in every respect, as his revolutionary and captivating aesthetic represented a fundamental rejection not only of the subject but also of the paintbrush itself. The constant interaction between construction and deconstruction is equally intriguing: the paint that has already been applied must be “destroyed” many times over before a new aesthetic impression can finally emerge. Richter is a relentless perfectionist who cannot tolerate anything that does not meet his exacting standards, and even the slightest imbalance in the composition or the color gradient is either perfected with maximum precision and effort or discarded without compromise. The internationally celebrated result of this captivating work process is a highly versatile, consistently high-quality painterly oeuvre. Starting with catalogue raisonné number 1, “Table” (1962), Richter's first black-and-white photo painting, it is, in terms of its versatility, artistic quality, and art-historical appreciation, comparable only to the oeuvre of Pablo Picasso.

Richter's peak – The mature “Abstract Paintings” following his “October Cycle” (1988)
The painting cycle “ 18. Oktober 1977 ” (known as the ‘October Cycle’ or ‘RAF Cycle’), created in 1988 and acquired for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, marks a pivotal moment in Richter’s oeuvre and is considered an iconic work today. At the time, the 56-year-old artist understood that after he had made the fifteen black-and-white photo paintings showing veiled fragments of the lives and deaths of the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, who were found dead in their prison cells, it would be more than challenging to return to the earlier “Abstract Paintings,” most of which were made with an almost gestural combination of brushes and thin squeegees. “I also realized that these paintings imposed new standards and demands on me. I may be mistaken now. [...] But I have already noticed that I find it difficult to continue painting now.“ (G. Richter, quoted from: Catalogue raisonné, vol. 4, p. 34). Most of the initial “Abstract Paintings” that followed feature compactly rendered surfaces in leaden gray tones and somber black-and-white contrasts. These impressive and exceptionally dense creations are dominated primarily by a melancholic mood and the flat use of the broad squeegee. Henceforth, the brush no longer plays a significant role and is mostly just used to apply the primer and to paint over parts of the layers of color. From this point on, the extensive use of the squeegee became the decisive characteristic of his painting. When he made the mature “Abstract Pictures” following his early photo-based black-and-white works bathed in a gentle blur, Richter was at the absolute zenith of his creative powers. Art history and Richter himself have described the “Abstract Paintings” as particularly mature due to their outstanding quality and density. Their fascinating novel aesthetics have secured Richter's growing international recognition and ultimately his undisputed position as one of the world's most important contemporary artists.

“Abstract Painting” (1997) – Maximum perfection: a symbiosis of sensuality and rigor
In the present composition “Abstract Painting” (1997), which was exhibited in the critical American Richter retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2002/2003, Richter not only achieved a perfect balance between sharpness and blur, depth and surface, light and dark, but also brought his painting to a new level of perfection through the choice of medium. It is one of the first “Abstract Paintings” for which Richter used a thin aluminum plate called alucobond as image carrier instead of canvas. Richter exploits the material’s hardness, which enables him to achieve technical perfection in his painting, allowing him to apply the paint with the squeegee with greater pressure so that the oil-based colors mix particularly delicately on the smooth, hard surface. In contrast to the canvas, the aluminum surface is free of anything that could interfere with the blending of the color layers: no fabric structure, no stretcher bars, no folding edges that show through in the final color gradient. The only disadvantage of this material, which Richter rediscovered, is its weight, which explains why he decided to produce smaller formats at this time before finally switching to the significantly lighter aludibond panels after the turn of the millennium, allowing him to work in larger formats again.
Dietmar Elger describes the special artistic quality of these highly refined and accomplished “Abstract Paintings” on aluminum from the late 1990s, in the foreword to his catalogue raisonné as follows: “The new paintings were less colorful and decorative, more restrained in their use of color, brittle, contradictory, and challenging.” (translated from: D. Elger, Einleitung, in: Gerhard Richter. Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 5, p. 26). In the present composition, which was first exhibited at the XLVII Venice Biennale in the year of its creation, dark red, earthy verticals move in front of vernal, luminous horizontals in subtly nuanced gradients of green, yellow, blue, and violet, much like a musical composition. Although Richter generally did not give his “Abstract Paintings” descriptive titles, the subtle optical play with the observer's eye that is trained on the perception of objects is inherent in all his abstract creations. Richter once described this captivating oscillation as follows: "The pictures thrive on the desire to recognize something in them. They show similarities to real phenomena at every point, but they cannot be properly identified. It's like in music: moods are created by notes that resemble real sounds, whether plaintive, joyful, shrill, or delicate. [...] They always remind us of something; otherwise, they would not be images at all." (G. Richter, 1999, quoted from: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, Cologne 2008, pp. 360ff.)

It is not only the viewer's perception and Richter's compositional principles of a subtle interplay of horizontals and verticals oriented toward the model of nature, but also the time-consuming process behind the making of his “Abstract Paintings,” which may take several months. Resembling the natural process of creation, formed by time and the laws of becoming and perishing, which cannot be ultimately penetrated by rational thought: "So, this working method involving arbitrariness, chance, inspiration, and destruction may produce a certain type of image, but never a predetermined image. The respective image should develop from a painterly or visual logic, as if it were inevitable. And by not planning the final image, I hope to achieve a coherence and objectivity that any piece of nature [...] always has." (G. Richter, quoted from: Catalogue raisonné, vol. 4, p. 34)
In 2020, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York honored the epochal work of the exceptional German artist with the major solo exhibition “Gerhard Richter – Painting after all,” which, like the retrospective "Gerhard Richter. Forty Years of Painting“ at the Museum of Modern Art (2002) and the retrospective ”Gerhard Richter: Panorama" (2013/14) at Tate Modern, spanned the arc from Richter's black-and-white photo paintings to his legendary abstract squeegee paintings. The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris currently honors the master artist with a spectacular retrospective that runs until March 2026. [JS]