The six paintings in this room were conceived by Gerhard Richter as a coherent group, named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage.
The cool yet sensual surfaces of the Cage paintings were built up in successive layers, each one scraped back then painted over again. The initial composition is all but obliterated in the process, allowing the paintings to develop in ways that cannot have been anticipated when Richter started work on them. Much of the paint was applied with a large squeegee brush swept across the surface of the canvas, leaving none of the highly expressive brushmarks prized by the Abstract Expressionists, and dissociating the painterly gesture from any emotional content.
The title of the series pays tribute to John Cage, who introduced elements of chance into the process of writing and performing music, and whose experimental ideas have influenced many artists. Richter also cites Cage’s declaration ‘I have nothing to say and I’m saying it’, which resonates with his own suspicion of ideologies and any claim to absolute truth. While many artists of the early twentieth century saw abstraction as embodying a utopian idealism, Richter’s practice is underpinned by implacable doubt and a tireless process of examining and questioning conventional certainties. As early as the 1960s, he is quoted as saying: ‘I don’t know what I want; I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.’
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. He lives and works in Cologne.
Curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume in collaboration with Gerhard Richter.
