Kl. Badende 1996

Gerhard Richter painted this "Kl. Badende" with oils, and it feels like he's wrestling with something, or maybe wrestling with nothing at all, just playing. The surface is all soft edges and blurred forms, as though seen through frosted glass. It's like a memory fading or a photograph that's slightly out of focus. The color palette is really restrained, almost monochromatic, which gives it this melancholic, reflective quality. The brown bleeds out from the edges. It obscures the figure slightly, but at the same time the figure is emerging out of this fog. The painting feels unfinished, yet utterly complete in its ambiguity. Like a Cy Twombly painting, it’s all about the gesture. The process is right there on the canvas for us to see. What I love most about art is that it's a constant conversation, ideas echoing and evolving across time. Richter’s dialogue between abstraction and figuration opens up so many possibilities.