4900 Colours 2007

Gerhard Richter made this painting, '4900 Colours', out of pure colour – 4900 squares of it, to be exact. Can you imagine the sheer, almost mechanical, act of creating this grid? I feel like Richter is in conversation with all those pointillist painters like Seurat. Except instead of tiny dabs of paint carefully placed to create a shimmering image, he's laid down these blocks like pixels. Standing here, close to the work, you get lost in the details, each colour vibrating against its neighbour. It's almost like a digital screen, but with so much more warmth. I imagine Richter grappling with this idea of mechanical reproduction versus the handmade. It is a challenge to find some kind of feeling in a thing like this. Does the repetition become almost meditative? I look at this, and I think about how every artist is in conversation with every other artist who ever lived. We’re all just trying to figure out how to make sense of the world.