Sale: 461 / Post War I, Dec. 09. 2017 in Munich Lot 868

 

868
Gerhard Richter
Gebirge, 1984.
Watercolor
Estimate:
€ 100,000 / $ 108,000
Sold:
€ 368,750 / $ 398,250

(incl. surcharge)
Gebirge. 1984.
Watercolor , oil and chalk.
Twice signed and dated in lower margin. Verso signed, dated and titled. On wove paper. 23.8 x 32 cm (9.3 x 12.5 in) , the full sheet.
[SM].

This work is mentioned in the online catalog of watercolors.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Southern Germany.

EXHIBITION: Gerhard Richter. Aquarelle. Graphische Sammlung, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 19 January - 17 February 1985.
Watercolors by Beuys, Palermo, Polke, Richter. Goethe-Institut London, 20 February - 11 April 1987.
Gerhard Richter. Zeichnungen und Aquarelle 1964-1999, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 4 September - 21 November 1999/ Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden 15 January - 19 March 2000/ Collection De Pont museum, Tilburg, 1st July - 8 October 2000.
Gerhard Richter. Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, neue Bilder. Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, 9 April - 18 June 2000.

LITERATURE: Gerhard Richter. Aquarelle, Munich 1985, color illu. on p. 63.
Dieter Schwarz (editor), Gerhard Richter. Aquarelle/Watercolors 1964-1997, Winterthur 1999, p. 139, color illu. on p. 65.
"Almost all abstract pictures show scenes, environments or landscpaes that don't exist, but they require a quality as if they existed. As if they were photographs of such scenes or regions that no one has seen yet, that can't even exist at all.“
Gerhard Richter 2012

Richter explains his transition to abstraction in an interview with Nicolas Serota in context of his 2011 exhibition \'67Gerhard Richter \u8211 Panorama\'67 at Tate Gallery in London. When Serota asked him why he began making abstract pictures even though he had a good reputation and a market as a figurative painter, Richter replied: \'67Perhaps because I am an unsure type, a bit unsteady. I have always been fascinated by the abstract. There is so much mystery in it, so much to discover.\'67 (Gerhard Richter - Panorama, 2012, p. 21). Richter conceives abstract painting as a permanent challenge and a platform on which a lot is simultaneously reflected, \'67my presence, my reality, my problems, my struggles and conflicts.\'67 (Dorothea Detrich and Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: An Interview, Print Collector\'65s Newsletter, 16, 1985, p. 128). His abstract works from the late 1970s and 1980s still play on figurative associations and show that the artist had not fully performed his transition to abstraction. The different superimposed color structures show an abstract material-related treatment of the paint, so that the result always refers to the process of creation. Gerhard Richter realizes a new form of abstract painting, of which it seemed that its forms of expression had already been exhausted, and created pictures that offer independent possibilities for visual perception.



868
Gerhard Richter
Gebirge, 1984.
Watercolor
Estimate:
€ 100,000 / $ 108,000
Sold:
€ 368,750 / $ 398,250

(incl. surcharge)