The Fiery Friction of Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild | Christie's

Why It Matters

The work highlights Richter’s mastery of color and technique, driving record auction prices and reaffirming abstract painting’s relevance in today’s high‑end market.

Key Takeaways

• Richter uses squeegee to layer and scrape red pigments.
• 1991 red series marks peak of Richter’s commercial success.
• Subtle light flashes emerge beneath fractured red surface.
• Visual references echo Rothko, Impressionists, Velázquez, Caravaggio influences.
• Christie’s auction highlights growing market demand for Richter’s abstracts.

Summary

Christie's video spotlights Gerhard Richter’s 1991 work “Abstraktes Bild,” a monumental red canvas created with the artist’s trademark squeegee. The piece belongs to a series of striking red paintings produced during a period of heightened commercial triumph for Richter, and it exemplifies his ability to manipulate pigment through layered application and scraping.

The video explains how Richter builds the surface by applying thick layers of red, then pulling the squeegee across the canvas to reveal glimmers of light and hidden hues beneath. This process fractures the color into an almost infinite spectrum, allowing subtle flashes of illumination to emerge and giving the work a dynamic, almost tactile quality.

Richter’s visual language draws on the emotional depth of Mark Rothko, the atmospheric brushwork of the Impressionists, and the chiaroscuro drama of Velázquez and Caravaggio, though none serve as direct models. The narration describes the pigment as writing its own story, drifting between abstraction and faint recognizability.

The piece’s prominence at Christie’s underscores the soaring market demand for Richter’s abstracts, reinforcing his status as a benchmark for high‑value contemporary art and signaling continued collector appetite for works that blend technical mastery with profound visual impact.

Original Description

Explore this incandescent example of Gerhard Richter’s celebrated Abstrakte Bilder (‘Abstract Paintings’).

Painted in 1991, during a period of outstanding professional triumph, it belongs to an extraordinary suite of distinctive red canvases created that year. With examples held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, these works take their place at the height of his abstract practice: a further example was illustrated on the cover of the catalogue for his retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London, that year. In the present work, tones of crimson, scarlet and vermilion shimmer and collide, marbled with silken swathes of shadow. The squeegee, Richter’s signature tool since the 1980s, is used to subtle yet dramatic effect, delicately parting the skeins of red to reveal flashes of light beneath. It is an exquisite meditation on the relationship between chance and control, illusion and reality, revelling in the fiery friction between them.

The Abstrakte Bilder dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s are widely considered to represent Richter’s finest achievements. Begun in the 1970s, and honed over the course of the following decade, these paintings took on a life of their own during this period, increasing in complexity, scale and ambition. Major series arose, including Eis (Ice) (1989, Art Institute of Chicago), Wald (Forest) (1990) and the celebrated Bach suite (1992, Moderna Museet, Stockholm). The latter, in particular—with their glimmering ruby curtains—may be seen to have their origins in the red paintings of 1991. Concurrently, Richter’s international reputation began to soar. The Tate retrospective was followed by a major presentation at Documenta IX in 1992, while 1993 saw the opening of his career-defining touring retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This landmark survey of more than 100 paintings, accompanied by a new catalogue raisonné, propelled the artist to global stardom.

Since the late 1960s, when he moved away from his early greyscale photo-paintings, Richter has repeatedly sought to dissect the chromatic spectrum. His Farbtafeln (Colour Charts) drew upon commercial colour samples in the spirit of Pop Art; his Rot-Blau-Gelb (Red-Blue-Yellow) paintings had mixed three tones in endless configurations. Many of his major series of the 1990s would also explore deliberately limited palettes, including the four Grün-Blau abstracts of 1993 (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), and the five Rot-Blau-Grün paintings of 1994 (Abgeordnetenhaus, Berlin). While the red paintings may be understood within this context, however, they are far from monochrome statements. In Richter’s hands, red fractures into a spectrum of infinite shades: from cherry and rose to brick, burgundy and carmine. In the present work, as in many others from the series, other colours glimmer through the surface like jewels. Red becomes a cloak, veiling tantalising hints of a world beyond.

Find out more: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6574303