Gerhard Richter - Abstraktes Bild 842-7

• oil on aluminium
• 48 x 55cm / Painted in 1997
• price upon request

‘Abstract is something everyday for me, as natural as walking or breathing.’ —Gerhard Richter

As one of the most influential and pioneering artists of the latter half of the twentieth-century, and a towering figure in the field of abstraction, Gerhard Richter is widely celebrated as one of the most important artists of his generation, and has been challenging the limits of painterly representation over the course of his decade-spanning career. Born in Dresden in 1932, the growing up in a rapidly shifting political and cultural landscape, Richter first enrolled at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1951 before later joining the Dusseldorf Academy in 1961 alongside Sigmar Polke. Experimenting with a wide variety of artistic styles and technical approaches, by the 1970s Richter's international reputation and career was gathering momentum and so began the development of a substantial number of colourful abstract works described simply as Abstraktes Bild. His innovative use of the squeegee in the 1980s transformed the course of his career, and by the 1990s, Richter was almost exclusively producing abstract paintings. Using his now famous squeegee technique, Richter scrapes paint across the canvas, the tool removing paint at the same time as it blends pigments together. Simultaneously revealing and concealing, these veils of colour become themselves the object of the work, there is no pre-figured image that is abstracted, rather it is the paint itself which is the subject in what Richter terms a ‘free abstract’.

Work by Richter is held in important public and private collections worldwide and he has been honoured with a number of significant awards. David Zwirner began representing the artist in 2023. His work has been presented in numerous solo shows and retrospective exhibitions at important institutions worldwide, and in April 2023, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin opened Gerhard Richter: 100 Works for Berlin. He lives and works in Cologne.

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