Gerhard Richter

Abstract Painting (809-3)

1994

Not on display

Artist: Gerhard Richter born 1932
Original title: Abstraktes Bild (809-3)
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 2300 × 2048 × 75 mm
Collection: ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland
Acquisition: ARTIST ROOMS Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Reference: AR00027

Online caption

From the mid 1980s, Richter began to use a home-made squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases. This spread the paint over the surface and integrated the various colours with each other. In the 1990s the artist began to run his squeegee up and down the canvas in an ordered fashion to produce vertical columns that take on the look of a wall of planks. 'Abstraktes Bild (809-3)' is typical of these paintings. One effect of the use of the squeegee was to create a blurring of one area of colour into another – similar to the blurring in Richter’s earlier photo-paintings – so that one has the feeling of looking at an out of focus image, that lies tantalisingly beyond decipherment.