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signed, dated 1976 and numbered 413 on the reverse oil on canvas 200 by 300cm. 78 7/8 by 118 1/8 in.

The present lot will be included in the forthcoming third Volume of the official catalogue raisonné, edited by the Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden, under no. 413, to be published in May 2013.

Provenance
Galerie Art in Progress, Munich
Schweisfurth-Stiftung Collection, Munich
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Part I, 23 June 1999, Lot 31
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Hamburg, Kunstverein, Landschaftsbilder, 1989

Literature
Jürgen Harten, Gerhard Richter Paintings 1962 - 1985, Cologne 1986, p. 202, no. 413, illustrated in colour
Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Vol. III, Osternfildern-Ruit 1993, no. 413, illustrated in colour
Minoru Shimizu, 'Gerhard Richter' in: BT, no. 1, 2003, p. 130, illustrated

Catalogue Note
Emanating celestial light on a spectacular scale, the divine and immersive beauty of Gerhard Richter’s Wolke is utterly beyond reproach. Dislocated from terra firma, Richter’s fair weather fragment of sky is a masterwork of vaporescent forms and delicate sfumato brushwork. Radiating luminescent sunlit hues filtered through a harmonic miasma of soft ephemeral forms, this painting is undeniably indebted to a long and familiar legacy of art historical heritage. Readily evocative of the Romantic and sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable’s famous cloud studies, the atmospheric light effects of Turner, as well as drawing on the cloud’s symbolic value as heavenly furniture in Renaissance and Baroque painting, the present work instantly conjures an encompassing transhistorical field of references, whilst remaining resolutely contemporary. Though drawing on a Nineteenth Century Romantic lineage and inescapably evoking a religiously loaded semiotic legacy, the artist’s fascination with clouds extends into an exploration of chance in painting - the ultimate expression of which was later refined from the 1980s onwards via the Abstrakte Bilder. Considered a deeply important facet in the encompassing trajectory of Richter’s career, many of the Cloud Paintings reside in numerous prestigious museum collections worldwide. Bearing a great similarity to Wolken (1970) housed in the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the present work’s formal and imposing beauty also rivals the National Gallery of Canada’s Cloud Triptych (1970), a work that recently formed a centrepiece in the touring Panorama retrospective. Representing the most pluralistic of thematic inquiries, the Cloud Paintings, more so than any other modality in Richter’s vast pantheon of subjects and media, forcefully straddles the readily drawn schism separating Richter’s abstract works from the hyperreal Photo Paintings. All at once, the stunning appearance of Wolke foregrounds religion, history and artistic inheritance within the complex debate for painting’s legitimacy in the later Twentieth Century.

Since the Medieval period and proliferate within the frescoed masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, clouds played a centrally decisive function in visually portraying the miraculous and divine - their vaporous forms withheld the potential for dissolving architectural boundaries to communicate the divine light of the infinite. Operating as the mid-point between the terrestrial and the celestial in countless frescoed church interiors, clouds are the traditional emblems for spiritual presence. As a subject of painting therefore, clouds are somewhat encumbered by a degree of cultural baggage – an aspect undoubtedly at stake within Richter’s series. Intriguingly, and perhaps somewhat indicative as to why the present work is so compositionally appealing, the harmonic arrangement in Wolke shares a pictorial equivalence to the asymmetrical balance of the most iconic work in the history of devotional art, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (c. 1512). Indeed, across his corpus of Cloud Paintings Richter makes a direct concession to devotional tradition by employing the triptych format: multi-part works such as those held in the National Gallery of Canada and Essl Museum in Austria impart an organisational schema rooted in the history of the three-panelled altarpiece. Grouped with the corpus of Photo Paintings depicting vanitas subjects of candles and skulls initiated in 1982, it is clear that Richter invokes and confronts a tradition intended to orient the viewer away from the earthly to some spiritual higher realm. Richter identifies this in conversation with Benjamin Buchloh in 1986: “I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting – of art in general – which we have lost, but which places obligations on us. And it is no easy matter to avoid either harking back to the past or (equally bad) giving up altogether and sliding into decadence” (Gerhard Richter in: ‘Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986’, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 148).

Growing up in Dresden, Richter would undoubtedly have been familiar with Caspar David Friedrich – Dresden was the city in which the father of German Romanticism established his reputation in the early Nineteenth Century. The atmospheric vapour, ethereal and mysterious effect pronounced by Richter’s Wolke finds immediate visual parity with the transcendental light-metaphors laid down within any number of works by Friedrich, such as Large Enclosure (1832) or Morning in the Riesengeberge (1810). Within the Twentieth Century the endeavours of Richter’s contemporaries to revive the genre of landscape, such as Lichtenstein’s comic book sea and cloudscapes or Blinky Palermo’s Minimalist abstractions, confer a somewhat anachronistic reading upon Richter’s romantic vistas in comparison. Though contemporaneous with Robert Smithson’s pioneering of Land Art, at first glance these works appear to share more in common with Constable’s masterful rendering of the sky or Turner’s treatment of atmospherics – ideologies rooted in specifically Nineteenth Century concerns with truthfulness to nature or an expression of the Sublime. Nonetheless, the subversion and contemporaneity of Richter’s works subtly operates within a remarkable double-speak. Speaking in 1986 Richter described his landscapes as “cuckoo’s eggs”, making explicit their inherently untruthful or misleading character (Gerhard Richter in: ‘Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986’, p. 163). Hubertus Butin critically expanded on this in 1994: “Richter’s landscape paintings do not go back to any religious understanding of Nature, for him the physical space occupied by Nature is not a manifestation and a revelation of the transcendental. In his pictures there are no figures seen from behind inviting the viewer to step metaphorically into their shoes or sink reverentially into some sublime play on Nature” (Hubertus Butin, ‘The Un-Romantic Romanticism of Gerhard Richter’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy and FruitMarket Gallery; London Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, The Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790-1990, 1994, p. 462). By employing the sublime visual language founded in Friedrich’s pantheistic view and passing it through a mechanical photographic document, Richter systematically de-romanticises the genre, making it resolutely contemporary. This particularly stands for the Cloud Paintings. Executed and exhibited in series, these are not celestial clouds supporting divine figures or concealing an intimation of a heavenly beyond; though undeniably beautiful as a painted artefact, Richter’s clouds are indifferent, isolated, fragmented and evacuated of an emphatic human element.

Following the irreconcilable events precipitated in the first half of the Twentieth Century, Richter confronts the impossibility of continuity: by invoking the Romantic tradition directly, Richter looked to “make visible the caesura separating his age from Friedrich’s” (Ibid., p. 80). In 1973 Richter acknowledged this strategy: “A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is ‘good’, it concerns us – transcending ideology – as art that we ostensibly defend (perceive, show, make). Therefore, ‘today’, we can paint as Caspar David Friedrich did” (Gerhard Richter, “Letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973” in: Hand Ulrich Obrist, Ed., The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 81). At first appearing incommensurate with contemporary practices of high-art, Richter’s detachment and evacuation of sentiment via the serial and mechanical, and its infusion with the vicissitudes of recent history, ensures a legitimate form of landscape painting that is also intensely beautiful. In Richter’s oeuvre clouds are emptied of their poignant Christian affect; historically evocative yet emotively absent, the intoxication and sublime wonder of God’s creation is replaced by the fragmentary and generalised: “Never spiritual, these totally secular clouds were rendered as merely divisible or repeatable motifs: minimalist clouds” (Mark Godfrey, “Damaged Landscapes” in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, 2011-2012, p. 84).

As a minimalist motif, the cloud paintings also serve an intriguing and strikingly central function in Richter’s exploration of anti-painting and chance. Very much aligned with the Colour Charts and Grey Paintings - Richter’s most pronounced concession to Minimalism - the Cloud Paintings represent the perfect natural analogy for a repudiation of artistic, gestural or stylistic choices: “I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no programme, no style, no directions. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery, I steer clear of direction. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty” (Gerhard Richter, Notes 1964 in: The Daily Practice of Painting, Ed., Hans Ulrich Obrist, London 1995, p. 73). As an artistic mission statement, Richter is categorical in his determination for indeterminacy; what’s more by their very metamorphic configuration and vaporescent nature clouds as a subject represent anti-matter aspiring to form. In painting clouds from photographs Richter not only evokes Alfred Stieglitz’s photographic Equivalents (1927) in employing the cloud as a Duchampian readymade, but also selects a model from nature perfectly equivalent to the central impetus that would later drive the Abstrakte Bilder.

First initiated during the early 1970s simultaneous with the group of Photo Paintings of close-up paint swirls, Richter’s Clouds offered a natural model for the indefinite and utterly indeterminate; an equation no less inverted within the very nascent abstract works via their semblance of natural landscape – a precedent that would later confer naturally referential titles upon many of Richter’s abstracts, such as Rain (1988), Eis (1989) or Forest (1990). Speaking of the latter in 1990 Richter explained: “I want to end up with a picture I haven’t planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture … by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of Nature (or Readymade) always possesses” (Gerhard Richter, Notes 1990, in: Ibid., p. 218).

As both abstract forms and photorealist paintings, these works represent the most metamorphic and multidimensional of Richter’s career – significantly, it was this body of work that conceptually furnished and facilitated the artist’s transition into full painterly abstraction in the late 1970s. Visually defining ontological openness, the present work simultaneously stands among the most beautiful and stunning of Richter’s career whilst representing the most transgressive, symbolically redolent and conceptually pluralistic motifs ever translated by the artist into paint. All aspects of the artist’s philosophical, historical and aesthetic concerns are subtly concentrated into the glorious miasma and ethereal sfumato that constitutes Gerhard Richter’s Wolke.

PROPERTY OF AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN COLLECTOR

Provenance
Denys Zacharopoulos, Paris (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Gerhard Richter: Painting, 1993
Bonn, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Gerhard Richter: Painting 1962-1993, 1993-1994
Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Gerhard Richter, 1994
Bignan, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Praxis, 1994
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Gerhard Richter, 1994

Literature
Exhibition Catalogue, Düsseldorf, Stadtische Kunsthalle; Berlin, Nationalgalerie Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Bern, Kunsthalle; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst, Gerhard Richter Paintings 1962-1985, 1986, p. 333, no. 579-1, illustrated in colour
Angelika Thill et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, no. 579-1, illustrated in colour

Catalogue Note
Masterfully orchestrated with vibrant hues of yellow, green and red through which underlays of dark pigment suspended in oil emerge and coalesce in an elegant corps a corps, this work appears as the evanescent landscape of a half-remembered dream. Demonstrating a powerful chromatic range of primaries dynamically swept across the picture plane, D.Z. is an early example of Gerhard Richter’s mature answer to the compositional challenges of abstraction.

Richter’s oeuvre is characterized by the herculean feat of challenging the medium that is the most established, aristocratic and weighed down by tradition: oil on canvas. His restless investigation into the matters of perception is conducted with such an extraordinary and seemingly limitless freedom despite its self-imposed material parergon that it indisputably crowns him as the master of contemporary painting. Described by Hans-Jakob Brun as one of the “extremely few artists on whom the focus in continuous”, his unique virtuosity led him to a phenomenal success that never tires. (Exh. Cat., Oslo, Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter, the Art of the Impossible – Paintings 1964-1998, 1999, p. 6)

The artist’s homage to illustrious art historian and co-curator of the 48^th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX Denys Zacharopoulos, D.Z. encapsulates on an intimate scale typical of Richter’s works from the mid to late 1980s his remarkable grasp on the foundations of our visual understanding and cognition. After decades of conceptual enquiry, the current lot lies at the crossroad of a paradigm shift in the artist’s practice – which, given Richter’s position of “incontrovertible centrality” within the canon of contemporary Art History means an outstandingly rare flicker of premonition into the future of painting and visual culture itself. (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh quoted in Exh. Cat., Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Gerhard Richter Large Abstracts, 2009, p. 9)

Over the past five decades, Richter’s practice has been driven towards the achievement of a single agenda: to find a middle ground in the dialectic between figuration and abstraction. In the corpus of his abstract works, this ambition evolved to find its resolution throughout strategies of ordered chance. Richter’s earliest experiments with complete abstraction verged either towards a cooler and systematic technique concealing evidence of the artist’s hand, which echoed a more geometric or minimalist type of abstraction such as Piet Mondrian’s or Barnett Newman’s, or on the contrary displayed spontaneous and thickly impastoed painterly gestures reminiscent of Jackson Pollock and Art Informel. These experiments conducted within the furthest recesses of abstraction resulted in the 1980s in his most celebrated body of work, the epic and ongoing Abstraktes Bilder – of which the present painting is one of the very first epitomic examples. D.Z.’s bold primary colours and sweeping layers of yellow paint tracked across the canvas by the squeegee are combined with organic and seemingly finger-painted red, bluish-grey and black accretions in a cross-like pattern. This makes of D.Z. an extraordinarily literal application of Richter’s career-defining paradoxical blend of the mechanical and the bodily, simultaneously revealing and concealing the artist’s presence.

The apotheosis of Richter’s oeuvre, the Abstraktes Bilder cross the perennial conceptual bridge between figuration and abstraction and declare it obsolete: all of Gerhard Richter’s paintings are pictures, as the abstracts evoke unrepresentable yet familiar images in the collective consciousness. Furthermore, the Abstraktes Bilder render void the primal dichotomy operated between order and chaos by bringing into form pictures that are not predetermined by the artist but whose production rely equally on spontaneous inspiration and the arbitrary accretions created by the squeegee - and D.Z. is the most fully resolved work up until that period to display evidence of Richter’s mastery of this hard-edged spatula which earned Richter early critical acclaim and later on a weight of almost canonical authority.

PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR

Gerhard Richter

B.1932
ABSTRAKTE BILDER

Estimate:

600,000 - 800,000 GBP [L. 51]

each: signed, numbered 716-18, 716-19, 716-20, 716-21 respectively and dated 1990 on the reverse oil on canvas, in four parts each: 25 by 21cm. 9 7/8 by 8 1/4 in.

The present lot will be included in the forthcoming fourth Volume of the official catalogue raisonné, edited by the Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden, under nos. 716-18, 716-19, 716-20, 716-21, to be published in 2014.

Provenance
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1991

Exhibited
London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter Mirrors, 1991, pl. 5, illustrated in colour

Literature
Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné 1962 - 1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern Ruit 1993, no. 716-18/19/20/21, illustrated in colour

Catalogue Note
First shown together as an ensemble alongside many of Gerhard Richter’s most spectacular works, the present four paintings represent the artist’s on-going investigation into the nature and potential of abstract painting. Abstrakte Bilder was originally part of Richter’s 1991 exhibition, Mirrors, held at Anthony d’Offay, in which the abstract works were exhibited alongside a number of diverse yet thematically linked paintings including Richter’s conceptual Four Panes of Glass from 1967, the famous Photo Painting of Richter’s daughter Betty from 1988, and a selection of Mirrors and Grey Paintings. Curated together these works illustrated the holistic nature of Richter’s oeuvre, while demonstrating the power of his abstract techniques, a facet readily apparent across the present four canvases. Numbered 716-18 through to 21, these intimately scaled paintings collectively act as an intriguing exemplar of Richter’s abstract painterly language. Imbued with sweeping grey tonalities punctuated with opalescent underlayers of crimson, green and blue, these works allow an insight into Richter’s creative practices, highlighting his ability to work simultaneously on several canvases in order to preserve the overall unity of Abstrakte Bilder. Indeed, displayed together, the appearance of these works as a whole marks a rare opportunity to fully appreciate the inner workings of Richter’s method - the product of which is today considered among the highest artistic achievements of the late Twentieth Century.

Since the very outset of his career during the early 1960s, Richter has called into question the conceptual underpinnings of painting and representation. Encompassing a variety of disparate yet thematically related painterly approaches, Richter’s career represents a cumulative inquiry into representation and abstraction in painting: positioned at the vanguard of this continuing project are the Abstrakte Bilder. As illustrated by the present works, Richter’s exploration into the field of abstraction stands distinct from both the formal and chromatic sparseness of minimalism, and the impassioned gestures of abstract expressionism. Rather, evoking the aesthetic blur of photography and immaculate cibachrome lamina of the print, Richter’s semi-automated procedure of repeatedly drawing layers of paint across the canvas with the squeegee results in a sense of harmonic painterly equilibrium.

Richter initially confronted abstract painting when he executed a group of vivacious and colourful sketches in 1976; created in 1991, the present group of small scale abstract works stem from over a decade of investigation into various technical and aesthetic abstract possibilities. The production of the Abstrakte Bilder, which to the present day still occupy the mainstay of Richter's painterly inquiry, stand as the most complex challenge of his career to date. The movement and application of the squeegee, visible in layered sweeps across the delicate tonalities of the present ensemble, indicates the true dedication of Richter’s painterly process, leading to intriguing gradations in texture and tonality. As the present works attest, Richter's abstract corpus stands as the true summation of an endlessly perpetuating creative journey.

Each individual quarter of Richter's Abstrakte Bilder is strikingly beautiful in its concentrated, miniature format. Emanating from a deep and clear understanding of the complexities of painterly abstraction in its varying illustrations, these four works embody a nuanced and ambiguous response to such formal tensions and their contrasting histories. Richter's abstraction wavers between a simultaneous negation and affirmation of the ineffability of the beyond, an idea elegantly suggested within the layers of arresting pigment that seem to give way to glimmers of an entirely alternate visual plane behind a diaphanous painterly screen: "somewhere you can't go, something you can't touch" (the artist in interview with Nicolas Serota, in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, 2011, p. 19). Ultimately Abstrakte Bilder– taken as the sum of its parts - is a masterful example of Richter’s investigations into the possibilities of pure painting: a celebration of the exciting potentials of a medium in which the artist is utterly in control.

Gerhard Richter

B.1932
ABSTRAKTES BILD

Estimate:

700,000 - 900,000 GBP [L. 140]

signed, dated 1992 and numbered 777-2 on the reverse oil on canvas 71.8 by 61.6cm.; 28 1/4 by 24 1/4 in.

Provenance
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Private Collection, Baltimore
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, 13 May 2009, Lot 146
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Literature
Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, no. 777-2, illustrated in colour

Catalogue Note
The rich, buttery smears of Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (777-2) pulsate in a rhythmic grid, highlighting the kaleidoscopic hues ranging from stark white to deep red and mossy green. The bold and vivid colors undulate in a lattice formation under the smooth, almost shimmering surface. The controlled vertical and horizontal striations of the present work clearly show Richter’s mastery of the squeegee technique at this point in his career.

The 1992 canvas was painted at the apex of Gerhard Richter’s career: the same year as he showed collection of his abstract paintings at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, the year after a dedicated exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery, and a year before Richter’s first touring retrospective exhibition. Facing a newfound celebrity, Richter approached his canvases of this era with a renewed confidence and prowess in his squeegee technique, yet still regarded his oeuvre with a self-critical eye, always harshly judging each work.

In 1992, Richter began a thorough exploration of gridded compositions in his abstract paintings, ranging in size and color. These grids seem to recall his Colour Chart paintings from the 1970s, which displayed a myriad of color samples in grids of varying size. Richter’s grids also pay homage to Modern master Piet Mondrian’s radically abstract geometric paintings. In Mondrian’s stylistic explorations of the early 20th century, he ultimately found the purest form of abstraction to be the grid. Mondrian harnessed blocks of primary color inside of the intersecting vertical and horizontal lines on rectangular or rhomboidal canvases. In 1998, Richter looked to Mondrian’s diamond-shaped canvases in the Abstraktes Bild (851) series of six works, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Though Richter closely studied his predecessor’s aesthetic, Mondrian’s exact, meticulous and minimalist aesthetic stands in stark contrast to Richter’s giant, energetic smears of vibrant colour.

Two decades after the Colour Chart paintings, while fully entrenched in his abstract aesthetic, Richter returns to his earlier color exploration. What renders the latticework of the 1992 abstraktes bilder unique from the Colour Charts is Richter’s relinquishing of a precise, detail-oriented technique with total control. Although Richter demonstrated acute skill and dexterity with his squeegee in 1992, the method is constantly subject to slippages, creating unplanned mistakes in the final canvas. In an interview with Sabine Schütz, Richter confesses, “I want to end up with a picture I haven’t planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture…I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself” (the artist quoted in: Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, 2009, p. 256)

Indeed, Richter’s final composition ultimately ends up surprising him. Richter begins his process by placing white, primed canvases around his studio, attacking each one with squeegee strokes, layering them until he decides the work is finished. Often Richter leaves a work hanging in his studio, only to decide days or weeks later that the work must be revisited or that the work is finished. Richter describes his process: “Over time, they change. In the end, you become like a chess player. It takes me longer than some people to recognize their quality, their situation – to realize when they are finished. Finally, one day I enter the room and say ‘checkmate’”(the artist quoted in: Michael Kimmelman, "Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms," New York Times, January 27, 2002).

Though thoroughly and entirely abstract, Richter confesses that his abstraktes bilder are not devoid of figuration. Indeed, Richter believes that even his most abstract works may reference the visual world. “Almost all the abstract paintings show scenarios, surroundings and landscapes that don’t exist., but they could create the impression that they could exist. As though they were photographs of scenarios and regions that have never been seen” (the artist quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, 2011, p. 19). Upon close inspection, forms appear to emerge from the present work: perhaps trees, windows, or skyscrapers, all seen in a blur of motion or even memory. This blurred effect makes reference to Richter’s photo-based painting style that he has weaved throughout his entire career. Subsequently, Abstraktes Bild (777-2) references Richter’s diverse aesthetic and range of styles from his earlier oeuvre in a beautiful amalgamation of colours, textures and lines.