Of spectacular proportions, with a diameter of four meters (260,4cm x 400cm), Abstract Bild, 1986, is one of the first large-scale paintings in the series ever made by the artist Gerhard Richter, which boast dimensions and chromatic intensity rarely found even within the great arc of the artist's monumental masterpieces. Abstraktes Bild will be offered at auction with an estimate of over £20m. The painting comes from a private American collection where it has remained since its last sale at Sotheby's New York in 2007 for $9,7 million (estimate $6-8 million), a record auction price at the time for an abstract work by Richter and the second highest price for the artist.
Richter produced only 24 Abstraktes Bild of this size
Furthermore, the present work is closely related to the current record price for Gerhard Richter at auction – another historic painting from 1986, just two works apart from the example in the artist's catalog raisonné – which was sold at Sotheby's in London in 2015 for £30,2m/$46,3m, the highest price for the artist ever to fetch at auction. The critical year of 1986 heralds a decisive turning point in the artist's work and the first large-scale traveling retrospective of the artist Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962-1985 in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Bern and Vienna. This is the moment where Richter takes the palette knife as his decisive and primary compositional tool, foregoing any planned compositional elements of form and structure in favor of the indeterminate scraping of the palette knife. After the artist's earlier explorations into abstraction between 1980-85 (with works characterized by layers of bold and broad brushstrokes), the works that followed from 1986 to 1989 represent the absolute pinnacle of Richter's Abstraktes Bilder. Reminiscent of a landscape, or the layers of a Monet painting of water lilies, the horizontal stripes of paint migrate across the Abstraktes Bild in an undulating motion across the width of the canvas. Texture, color and structure are unfolded here with spectacular force, with the sliding scratch of the palette knife revealing the kaleidoscopic architectural texture of the artist's underlying paint. In perfect compositional balance, the deep blue greens on the left side of the composition give way to luminous primary colors of red, yellow and blue on the right side, in a gradation reminiscent of the artist's early photographic paintings.
