Dimensions: support: 521 x 780 x 23 mm
Copyright: © Gerhard Richter | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: This is Gerhard Richter's Oil Sketch No. 432/11. What grabs you first? Editor: It feels like looking through a dense thicket. It's chaotic but somehow calming, like nature reclaiming urban space. Curator: Richter's abstract paintings often explore the tension between representation and abstraction, suggesting landscapes without fully committing to them. Editor: Right. Post-war German art really grapples with themes of memory, loss, and the reconstruction of identity after trauma, and I feel this sketch encapsulates this. Curator: Perhaps the sketchiness suggests a fleeting glimpse of something, a memory barely grasped. Editor: Absolutely. Art becomes a site to unpack personal and collective histories. This piece pushes me to question the boundaries between what is seen and what is felt. Curator: I feel a strange sense of peace now, perhaps that's what it does best.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/richter-oil-sketch-no-43211-t02380
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This small painting was used as the basis for Abstract Painting No. 439, also in this display. ‘I do not paint the oil sketches with the intention of using them for the big smooth pictures, but I subsequently use some of the sketches as patterns for big pictures’, Richter has said. ‘The oil sketches look as if they had been painted quickly, but they often take longer than the big paintings, as they are altered from time to time to look as heterogeneous as possible.’ Gallery label, April 2007
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