The ARTIST ROOMS collection includes an important group of paintings, sculpture and constructions by Gerhard Richter providing a fascinating encounter with the diverse and complex art of this great modern master. Richter was born in Dresden where he trained at the Academy and worked briefly as a mural painter. He moved to West Germany in 1961, just before the construction of the Berlin Wall, and enrolled in the Academy in Düsseldorf where he quickly became part of the circle of young talent that emerged there and in nearby Cologne in the 1960s. Although Richter engaged with various new tenden­cies including conceptual and performance art as well as Pop Art, his focus remained on the time-honoured medium of paint­ing.

Over the ensuing decades he contin­ued a systematic and rigorous exploration of the processes of painting, generating an abundant output that can range from photographic realism to the most uncom­promising abstraction and take the form of the subtlest exercises in monochrome or the most intense colour, with every variation in between. Often pitched against prevailing fashions and trends, Richter has worked to reaffirm the status and relevance of the act of painting, viewing it as ‘one of the most basic human capacities’. In 1992 he concluded an interview with the remark: ‘All I know is that painting is useful and important, like music and art in general … painting is an indispensable necessity of life.’

Many of Richter’s works of the 1960s and early 1970s were figurative, based on photographs that he had either taken himself or had found in magazines, books or the mass media. From the mid-1970s, abstract painting became more predom­inant although he continued to work in realist styles and to explore innovative constructions using mirrors or panes of glass. With its vibrant colour and lively surface, the painting selected here is a superb example of Richter’s production in the 1990s. As in many of his abstract pieces of this period, the picture results from an almost mechanical process that owes as much to chance as to design.

Richter manipulated his oil paint with a large, broad squeegee, using this tool to add and scrape off paint and allowing the colours to blend and smear, mix and blur in unpredict­able ways as the picture evolved. The tracks of the squeegee’s blade are clearly visible in the vertical bands which move across the composition from left to right. Despite its apparent vigour and spontaneity, a picture like this will have been carefully developed through numerous successive states so that the final result is a rich amalgam of colour with previously erased layers glinting through to the final surface. The luscious greens mingling with vivid yellows, punc­tuated here and there by traces of blue, are vaguely suggestive of landscape elements, while the evidence of creation and destruc­tion in the paint layers also invites parallels with organic or natural processes.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.