Townscape M7 1968

Gerhard Richter made this painting, Townscape M7, using oil on canvas. It's all greyscale, giving it this ghostly, almost photographic feel, but then you get up close and see how the paint is laid down in these really deliberate, blocky marks, and that tension between representation and abstraction is what makes it so compelling. Look at the impasto—thick in some areas, like that dark central shape that could be a tree, and then thin and scrubbed in others, creating a real push and pull. You can almost feel him working the surface, adding and subtracting, searching for the image within the paint. I keep thinking of Giorgio Morandi, with his muted colors and quiet compositions, but Richter is way more restless. It's like he's saying that the world is always in flux, never fully knowable, and painting is just a way of grappling with that uncertainty.