Townscape M4 1968

Here is the script: This is Gerhard Richter’s ‘Townscape M4,’ made with oil on canvas. Just imagine Richter working on this series, probably quite quickly, with confidence, almost like automatic writing. The palette is tight, almost monochromatic, hovering between grey, white, and blue. You see the buildings emerging from the paint; the paint sort of stands in for, or maybe even becomes the buildings. It's like he's constructing a world, a city, from pure pigment. I think of de Kooning’s abstractions of New York, where the city is more of a feeling than a place. Look at that black mark on the lower part of the painting, how it cuts across everything else. It's raw, it's immediate, and yet it creates depth. Richter, like all of us, is in conversation with other painters, across time, and he's using the language of paint to talk about the world, about seeing, and maybe about the impossibility of truly capturing either one.