Lot 22: GERHARD RICHTER

PROPERTY FROM THE VANTHOURNOUT COLLECTION

B. 1932
MARIA (544-4)

78 ¾ x 78 ¾ in. 200 x 200 cm.

signed, titled and dated 1983 on the reverse

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Galerie Kröner Collection, Germany
Private Collection, Germany
Anthony Meier Fine Arts, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2003

EXHIBITED

Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Berlin, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Bern, Kunsthalle Bern; Vienna, Museum moderner Kunst / Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Gerhard Richter Bilder: Paintings 1962-1985, January - September 1986, p. 291, illustrated

LITERATURE

Axel H. Murken and Christa-Altrogge, Von Expressionismus bis zur Soul and Body Art, Cologne, 1985, pl. no. 54, illustrated
Jürgen Harten, ed., Gerhard Richter, Bilder Paintings 1962-1985, Cologne, 1986, cat. no. 544/4, p. 291, illustrated
Angelika Thilll, et. al., Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. III, Osterfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 544/4, p. 176

NOTE

"If I paint an abstract picture (the problems are not dissimilar with the other works) I neither know in advance what it is supposed to look like, nor where I intend to go when I am painting, what could be done, to what end. For this reason the painting is a quasi blind, desperate effort, like that made by someone who has been cast out into a completely incomprehensible environment with no means of support -- by someone who has a reasonable range of tools, materials and abilities and the urgent desire to build something meaningful and useful, but it cannot be a house or a chair or anything else that can be named, and therefore just starts building in the vague hope that his correct, expert activity will finally produce something correct and meaningful." (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Gerhard Richter, 1991, p. 116)

Until the early 1980s, Gerhard Richter was primarily known for his monochromatically grey or blue calibrated paintings derived from photographic sources. Based on these previous works, most people would not have thought of him as a colorist. Since the Abstrakte Bild (Abstract Paintings), it is now rather difficult to think of him as anything other than one of the great colorist of the second half of the 20^th century. The present work, Maria from 1983, is one of the most stunning and lushly vibrant compositions in the entire series of Richter's Abstract Paintings which evolve in stages, building up layers of gestural compositions.

Richter usually begins with a soft ground of primary or pure colors arranged in a variety of patterns, in this case, yellow, blue and a softly diffuse green. Richter then applies another overlay of paint, which is brushed, dragged, squeegeed or streaked in strident and aggressive colors. In Maria, the broad muscular strokes of black, orange, red, green and blue, often intermixed together in the act of painting, add dimensions that are both present and indefinable. The process of simultaneous creation and destruction, repeated several times in each canvas, complicates the traditional figure/ground relationship, challenging the viewer's perception of the layered composition. The choreography of paint in Maria possesses structural qualities suggestive of musical compositions: some passages display the largo of a slower movement, others are more frenetic cacophonies of color and brushstroke. Richter seems to translate paint into assonances and dissonances, just as modern composers like Schönberg composed music.

Throughout his process, Richter employed the same techniques used in his earlier representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. Spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving and subtracting paint create an illusion of space. Despite unnatural palettes, sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist's tools, the Abstract Paintings often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside, just as in his representational paintings; there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In his Abstract Paintings, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.

Richter's Abstract Paintings are clearly his most spontaneous, visually complex, and emotionally evocative works, perpetuating the tradition of Modernist painting. Gerhard Richter's creative vision is one that is centered on the artist's process and procedures, and how the mechanics of painting affect the dynamic and structure of composition. This, together with an on-going love affair with the physicality of paint, is nowhere more passionately displayed than in Maria.

QUOTE

"One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting." (From Richter, 'Notes 1973', in The Daily Practice of Painting, p.78.)