Nov 17, 2011 - Sale 2262

Sale 2262 - Lot 245

Price Realized: $ 13,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
GERHARD RICHTER
Kassel.

Offset color lithograph with hand coloring in black and white enamel on photographic paper mounted on smooth cream wove paper, 1992. 160x235 mm; 6 3/8x9 1/4 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 29/50 in pencil, lower margin. Published by Documenta GMbH, Kassel.

The signature of German artist Gerhard Richter's (born 1932) work remains his scraping and blurring across compositions, regularly obscuring representational imagery in his photo-paintings or sometimes revealing the many layers and techniques of his strictly abstract, vibrantly colorful paintings. In 1961 Richter began painting from black-and-white photographs culled from newspapers, magazines and books in an effort to escape the complicated starting point of where and how to begin a painting. By the the 1970s he gave up painting from found photographs and painted from his own photographs, such as the present print which is based on a photograph taken in 1992. The smudging, smearing and sometimes peculiar application of paint directly on photographic prints (here, the rippling white and black enamel) can confound and disrupt the image altogether, inevitably conjuring a fragile illusion and fleeting conception in our world. Butin 78.