Abstraktes Bild – P1

Based on Gerhard Richter’s eponymous painting from 1990, ‘Abstraktes Bild’ is a chromogenic print
published by HENI in 2014. Produced through Richter’s signature use of a squeegee to distribute colour
across the surface, this image is dominated by acid chromatic contrasts of reds, blues and yellows
merging into each other. Rather than suggesting recognisable shapes or forms, the impasto is dispersed
into layers of various thickness with an essence which remains impenetrable.

Richter’s powerful yet meditative abstract paintings are the products of a life‐long engagement with art
history. These tactile, magnetic surfaces owe much to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and even
Monet’s Post‐Impressionist studies of sunsets. Unlike these sources of inspirations, however, Richter
chose to forego a personalised brushstroke, allowing the squeegee, a Perspex sheet fixed to a wooden
handle, to scrape the canvas and create seemingly mechanical compositions.

‘Abstraktes Bild’, with its fluid multi‐coloured layers and specks of red paint, evocative yet stubbornly
impervious to interpretation, seems to embody Richter’s philosophy according to which ‘to talk about
painting is…perhaps pointless. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing…
and painting has nothing to do with that’.