Gerhard Richter

Abstract Painting (809-3) 1994

German painter. In the early 1960s Richter was

exposed to both American and British Pop art,
which was just becoming known in Europe, and

to

the Fluxus movement. Richter consistently

regarded himself simply as a painter. He began
to paint enlarged copies of black-andwhite photographs using only a range of greys.
The evident reliance on a ready-made source gave Richter's paintings an apparent
objectivity that he felt was lacking in abstractart of the period. The indistinctness of
the images that emerged in the course of their transformation into thick layers of oil
paint helped free them of traditional associations and meaning. Richter concentrated
exclusively on the process of applying paint to the surface..
As early as 1966 he had made paintings based on colour charts. Although these
paintings, like those based on photographs, were still dependent on an existing
artefact, all that was left in them was the naked physical presence of colour as the
essential material of all painting.
All vestiges of subject-matter seem to have been abandoned by Richter in the
paintings that he began to produce in 1976. Even these supposedly wholly invented
paintings retained a second-hand look, as if the brushstrokes had been copied from
photographic enlargements.
The extreme variety of Richter's work left him open to criticism, but his rejection of an
artificially maintained consistency of style was a conscious conceptual act that
allowed him to investigate freely the basic principles of painting