Gerhard Richter

Born Dresden, Germany 1932
Lives Cologne, Germany
Abstraktes Bild (742-4) (Abstract Picture), 1991
Oil on wood
57 x 59 inches
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Mimi and Bud Floback in honor of
Suzanne Delehanty

German artist Gerhard Richter has been one of the most influential painters of the past half century.  Working in a wide variety of styles, ranging from flat monochromes to precise photorealism, he has spent a lifetime examining the language of painting and relationship between abstraction and representation.

In 1959, the 27-year-old Gerhard Richter saw Jackson Pollock's "drip paintings" for the first time. This experience forever changed his views abut how art is made and defined. Like Pollock's canvases, Richter's Abstraktes Bild has a highly active surface, with puddles, splatters and drizzles of paint, yet it is hard to detect the artist's gestures in the work. Richter used broad, flat tools, such as squeegees, rather than brushes to smear layers of wet paint across the surface.  The movement and the luscious colors seduce us. But we also sense that, unlike Pollock's drip paintings, which were the result of an intense dialogue between artist and canvas, Richter's work reflects an almost machine-like impersonality of the execution. In his detachment, the artist looks upon painting as a process rather than as a form of subjective self-expression.