Expert Voices: Emma Baker on Richter's Abstraktes Bild
195Headlining Sotheby's London Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction on 1 March 2023, Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild, 1986, spans four meters across and is one of the first large-scale paintings from the series ever.
Reminiscent of a landscape, or the strata of a Monet waterlily painting, the horizontal swathes of paint migrate across Abstraktes Bild in wave like-motion across the breadth of the canvas. Texture, colour and structure are here deployed with spectacular force, with the gliding scrape of the squeegee revealing the kaleidoscopic architectural structure of the artist’s underpainting.
It is a masterpiece created during the critical year of 1986, which saw the artist's first large-scale touring retrospective and was also the year in which Richter first took up the squeegee as his principal compositional tool. He has only ever produced 24 Abstraktes Bild of this magnitude (with a width greater than 380 cm), of which half of these reside in museum collections across the globe.