Cage P19-3

One of a series of Giclée prints based on Gerhard Richter’s ‘Cage Paintings’ (2006) series, ‘Cage 3’ (P19-3, 2020) is an intensely textured and evocative work. The image is primarily composed of light grey and white, which traverse the picture plane in horizontal bands, peppered with visible scratch marks and indentations.

The roughly textured finish of the canvas in ‘Cage 3’ is the result of Richter’s innovative painting method, wherein layers and layers of paint were tugged and spread over the canvas with the artist’s famous squeegee. This hand-made tool, fashioned from a Perspex bar and handle, allowed the artist to either add or remove strips of colour to a canvas, alternatively obscuring and revealing the layers beneath, in a constant process of addition and subtraction.

Through this random yet selective method, which allowed him to choose the accidents he wanted to keep and to obscure those he did not, Richter was able to create abstract canvases whose colours seem to gain a life of their own. Though the artist worked deliberately, the introduction of a mechanical element to the process (in the form of Richter’s squeegee) allowed chance to play a role in the formation of each final image.