7/29/2019 Gerhard Richter: Abstract Painting 725-3 - by Jason Beale

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Gerhard Richters Abstract Painting 725-3

By Jason Beale (2005)

Abstraktes Bild 725-3, 1990, Oil on canvas, 225 x 200 cm (H x W)

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/search/detail.php?paintid=6857

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At the National Gallery of Victoria (International) in Melbourne there is not much space

for contemporary art. In two average-sized rooms on the top floor there is a meager

selection of works from the last three decades. Whether by accident or design, this

display resists forming a coherent narrative. This lack of certainty in the meaning of art is

an appropriate context for the work of Gerhard Richter, one of the most successful and

important artists of recent times.

Richter (b. 1932) spent his early adult years in East Germany, where socialist realism

was the official style. He moved to West Germany in 1961, at a critical moment when the

purist formalism of modern art was being challenged by pop-art and conceptual

movements. In response, his development as an artist has been a continuing

engagement with the possibility of painting after the fall of modernism. Over the last 40

years he has painted blurred versions of photographs, questioning the status and

meaning of representation itself. Since 1976 he has also produced abstract works, starkly

different in appearance from his photo-paintings, yet equally mechanical in approach.

Ever since postmodern theory negated the authenticity of self-expression in art, Richters

work has been recognized as conceptually progressive in its detachment. Yet at the same

time it manages to provide aesthetic pleasure to modernist and postmodernist alike.

At eight by six feet,Abstract Painting (725-3)* is impressively big and colourful, with an

appealing abstract design. Different colours have been scraped across each other

orange, yellow, red, blue, and green. From the left edge, white paint is spread as if by a

large squeegee. The underlying colours alternately mix with the white and break through

in randomly chaotic patterns, especially at the right edge of the painting where yellow

and green jostle for attention. The top and bottom edges are only roughly covered by

paint, so that multiple layers of underpainting can be seen, including orange and purple

that act to frame the composition. Almost as if by accident

*Richter has numbered all his works since 1962

7/29/2019 Gerhard Richter: Abstract Painting 725-3 - by Jason Beale

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the centre of the painting is haphazardly scarred by thin vertical marks. Unlike a work of

abstract expressionism, there are no purposeful gestures and no sense of artistic effort.

Instead, chance has been calmly and deliberately harnessed by the artist to create a

surprisingly well composed and visually dynamic work of abstraction.

Richter has been described as deconstructing the rhetoric of painting (Wood 1994:

186), and his impersonal approach to process is seen as stripping painting of its

metaphysical associations. Yet face to face with Abstract Painting (725-3) it has an

undeniable effect as an aesthetic totality in its own right. In 1986 Richter himself

described his abstractions as a search for something which I could not plan, which is

better, cleverer, than I am, something which is also more universal (Richter 2003:

1152). In seeking something more universal Richter subverts his own status as a

subversive postmodernist. As if confirming this, Abstract Painting (725-3) does evoke a

un-nameable mood in the viewer, despite its lack of personal expression.

There is a large amount of critical commentary on Richters work, which perhaps only

obscures its ability to communicate directly. It is left to the viewer to relate to the

painting within their own framework of expectation and understanding. In the final

analysis his seemingly impersonal method leaves his work fundamentally open to

interpretation, so that it is free to mean anything and nothing at the same time. This is

perhaps its real significance - that it is at once both an affirmation and a calling into

question of the meaning of art.

References

Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul (eds). 2003. Art In Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing

Ideas.New Edition. Blackwell: Malden MA

Richter, Gerhard. 2003. from Interview with Benjamin Buchloh. In Harrison & Wood (eds).

Roberts, John (ed). 1994. Art Has No History! The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art. Verso:

London.

Wood, Paul. 1994. Truth and Beauty: The Ruined Abstraction of Gerhard Richter. In Roberts (ed).