Gerhard Richter - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, November 15, 2023 | Phillips
  • Gerhard Richter’s Untitled (1.8.89) challenges our ability as viewers to absorb visual information. Atop an image of a church with soaring arches and passersby are vibrant, textured splashes of yellow, blue and orange. As such, the present work straddles abstraction and realism in its purest forms. Such a dichotomy is central to Richter’s combination of media, and rich interpretive meanings arise from the pairing of paint and photograph. This work is one of the very first of Richter’s overpainted photographs. Beginning in the same year, 1989, Richter began to employ a process which begins with taking otherwise wasted images—whether it be snapshots he rejected as image sources for paintings, or duplicates and blurry shots from personal albums. Printed in commercial 4 x 6-inch scale, the photograph is then dragged across wet paint left on the plastic squeegee used for one of his renowned Abstraktes Bilder. This unique combination of image and paint—the tools on which his painting process relies—produces a new artistic form that derives meaning from both of its sources.

     

    These intimately-scaled works address some of the central questions of Richter’s artistic practice. When paint lies atop an accurate representation of reality, the meaning of the snapshot changes, with details obscured or altered. Siri Hustvedt describes this effect: “the artist’s strokes intensify my interest in what’s happening by reducing my frame of vision, but also by turning the action into part of an artwork, an alteration that is almost ludicrously profound.”i The abstract forms of the paint, in turn, gain associative meaning as viewers project them into the settings of the original photograph—what might have been a context-less amorphous blob becomes a curtain, a wave, or a floating being. 

     

     

    i Siri Hustvedt, "Truth and Rightness," in Gerhard Richter Overpainted Photographs, Markus Heinzelmann, ed., Hatje Cantz, 2008, p. 74.

    • Provenance

      Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Artist Biography

      Gerhard Richter

      German • 1932

      Powerhouse painter Gerhard Richter has been a key player in defining the formal and ideological agenda for painting in contemporary art. His instantaneously recognizable canvases literally and figuratively blur the lines of representation and abstraction. Uninterested in classification, Richter skates between unorthodoxy and realism, much to the delight of institutions and the market alike. 

      Richter's color palette of potent hues is all substance and "no style," in the artist's own words. From career start in 1962, Richter developed both his photorealist and abstracted languages side-by-side, producing voraciously and evolving his artistic style in short intervals. Richter's illusory paintings find themselves on the walls of the world's most revered museums—for instance, London’s Tate Modern displays the Cage (1) – (6), 2006 paintings that were named after experimental composer John Cage and that inspired the balletic 'Rambert Event' hosted by Phillips Berkeley Square in 2016. 

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167

Untitled (1.8.89)

signed, inscribed, partially titled, dedicated and dated "für Bernadette Gerhard Richter 1.8.89 München" on the reverse of the artist's mount
oil paint on chromogenic print
5 7/8 x 4 in. (14.9 x 10.2 cm)
Painted on August 1, 1989, this work is unique.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$30,000 - 50,000 

Sold for $57,150

Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
+1 212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 November 2023