Tag: 4900 farben

Life-sized portraits of lap-sized, wide-eyed poodles aren’t the only thing Sotheby’s is selling tomorrow. It’s also selling one of Gerhard Richter’s greatest paintings, 4096 Farben, CR-359, (1974). The 64×64 grid of 1024 different colors, each painted somewhere four times, is sort of a capstone of Richter’s color chart project. At least until the Köln cathedral windows, of course. And those are not for sale.

I wasn’t going to post this before I saw the drop-shadow in the image above. Because unlike most of the illustrations in the catalogue for 4900 Colours, it is actually a photograph of a painting.

Lot 115: Gerhard Richter, 4096 Farben, est. $18-25m [update: gekauft for $21.8m] [sothebys]

I was kind of baffled when I saw this Richter in Christie’s February sale in London, and I’ve had it on my desktop ever since. It’s called Cage Grid I, and it’s a 16-panel giclée print [!!, oh how I hate that word] mounted on aluminum that reproduces the 2006 squeegee painting, Cage 6, basically at 1:1 scale.
In fact, if you include the small gaps between the 75cm square panels, the giclée version is slightly larger than the 3×3-meter painting. It pulls the painting apart instead of occluding it with a grid overlay. Though there are digital prints and inkjet prints in the artist’s CR, Cage Grid is the only edition listed as a giclée. There are both complete editions Cage Grid I and 16 individual quadrants, Parts A-P, Cage Grid II.
Richter has chopped up his paintings before, turning full-size squeegee paintings into a series of tiny squeegee fragments. He’s made giant gridded photo panels before, like Strontium (2004), at the deYoung Museum. He’s got reconfigurable grid paintings [mounted on Aludibond, btw], like 4900 Colours.
He’s made photos of Strip paintings, which are actually manipulated photos of fragments of another squeegee painting, digitally printed, and mounted on aluminum and sometimes under plexi.
And he’s made photo versions of paintings before. These 1998 Orchid offset prints are done at full-scale of the 1997 painting, but cropped in five different ways. Herr Heyde is a little 2001 offset print on Aludibond that’s the same size as the little 1965 painting. [Richter favored offset prints, then a few c-prints, before going digital, except for Ice 2, a 2003 half-scale reproduction of a 1989 squeegee painting that’s actually a 41-color screenprint.] There’s 1:1 Uncle Rudi (2000), and the 1996 photo edition of the painting of the photo of his wife, which I thought would make a good Richard Prince nurse painting. Seven Two Four (2005) are 1:1-scale blurred photos of a 1990 squeegee painting. [A painting for which Richter has atypically posted 21 detail photos.]

Wow, when you shoot it that way, the 1:1 photo edition of Mustang Squadron (2005) looks amazing, and not at all like a bridge line version of the couture original. Speaking of which, back in 1998 Richter made a 1:1 photo edition of 48 Portraits, his landmark blurred painting grid from the 1972 Venice Bienale.

And this is one thing that nags at me about Cage Grid: even if I buy the arguments about photo vs. painting, experimentation, or materialist variation, I feel like what’s actually being sold is iconic sameness. It’s not so much the Capitalist Realism that–actually, yes, it’s the capitalist reality that gets me, but not the supply, the demand. I feel less undone by the artist churning out a towering Kinkadian pyramid of merch than by the critico-consumer desert criss-crossed by collectors, institutions and speculators that swallows it up.
It’s not that Richter makes readily monetizable editions of iconic works he loans to museums. [The Cage series is at Tate. Modern. The Cage Grid prints were actually sold by Tate Modern, during the 2011 Panorama retrospective.] It’s that despite my ambivalence, I want some. [Oh, look, that Mustang Squadron that sold at Phillips in 2006 is up for sale at Sotheby’s.]
14 Feb. 2014, Lot 120: Gerhard Richter, Cage Grid I (Complete Set), 2011, 15/16, plus 4ap, sold for £566,500 [christies.com]
15 May 2014, Lot 243: Gerhard Richter, MUSTANG-STAFFEL (MUSTANG SQUADRON), ed. 39/48, 1 AP, est. $250,000-350,000 [sothebys]
Previously, uneasily related, partly because I only just now remembered I had similar qualms about a similar situation last year: Gerhard Richter’s Septembers

Oh Gerhard-Richter.com, why did I ever doubt you?

Last February, while holed up in the Snowpocalypse, I thought the hell out of the Serpentine Gallery’s catalogue for Richter’s 4900 Colours. The work consists of 25 enamel color squares arranged randomly on 196 5×5 aluminum laminate panels, and it relates very closely to the random, pixel-like stained glass window the artist created for the Cologne Cathedral in 2007, which was in turn related to an earlier color grid painting Richter did in the 1970s.
The frontispiece of the catalogue [above] shows the artist, nattily dressed, with brush and paint in hand, contemplating the final yellow square on a 25-square panel. Yet the text describes the actual production process for 4900 Colours, which involved random color placement determined by computer [the same program used to create the window], and mass production of enamel tiles, which were assembled and bonded to the aluminum substrate.
How to reconcile this apparent contradiction: Benjamin Buchloh praising the work’s industrial facture, while the making of photo captures The Touch of The Master’s Hand? And to complicate matters–or to solve the paradox–the grid on the painting Richter was photographed working on does not match any of the 196 panels in the piece.
The answer was right there on gerhard-richter.com all along. Almost. A search for all paintings made in 2006 and 2007, around the time of the cathedral window and 4900 Colours, turns up ten paintings, all 2007, titled 25 Colours, which have identical dimensions and materials, and which appear to have identical colors, as the 196 panels in 4900 Colours.

Thanks to the artist’s catalogue-raisonne-as-you-go numbering system, we can see the order in which they were created, and their apparent relationships or context. The Cologne Cathedral window is actually listed under paintings as CR:900, and is followed by four 25 Colours works, CR:901-1 through 901-4. Then comes 4900 Colours, CR:902, and six more 25 Colours numbered–wait for it–CR: 902-29, -31, -37, -39, -49, and -50. Which sounds like a series of four works, plus a series of panels, 196 of which go together, and 6 of which become autonomous works.
But. The photo Richter’s painting up top doesn’t match any of these ten, either. And if sharing a CR number means anything about their production, then the six 902 paintings are made exactly like 4900 Colours: at an auto body shop. Are CR:901’s handpainted? Is the photo in the book of a reject, or a study, a 900.5 whose handpainted facture didn’t pass muster? I guess we still don’t know.

This chronological view, though, adds another dimension to the context of Richter’s process, and it ties together three major projects involving randomness: 4900 Colours, the Cathedral window, and a suite of six large abstract paintings named for John Cage. There are 25 more squeegee paintings in between the window and the Cage paintings, but they are listed under only two CR numbers: 898 and 899. If I understand my Richter process, that means he worked on them in two batches, which might have taken “weeks.”
I’d completely forgotten that the installation video for 4900 Colours reminded me of Cage’s incredible exhibition-as-performance, Rolywholyover.
But I remembered watching Rob Storr talk about the Cage Paintings, though he doesn’t project their relationship forward. Or sideways. Richter’s window was dedicated in 2007, but the design was unveiled, fabrication had begun, and fundraising had been completed in September 2006. Which means Richter was working on the window and the Cage Paintings concurrently.
Storr quotes Cage on how, whatever randomness exists in your process, what’s not “an accident is what you decide to keep.” Which is about as close an answer as I can get for what happened to that grid painting up top.
So did the need for window randomness lead Richter to Cage, or did Cage lead Richter to randomness? I guess I’ll have to start digging.

OK, now it’s been bugging me a bit, this catalogue photo of Gerhard Richter with a paint brush, ostensibly going to town on the work that is the lone subject of the book, 4900 Colours, which is comprised of randomly generated color grids on 196 enamel-on-aluminum panels.
First off, I think the explanation is correct that the painting in the photo is actually a study, a prototype, a concept, a related-but-distinct work. But as the first thing a reader sees upon opening the catalogue, the photo powerfully argues–or implies–that Richter painted the work we are about to see.
Which I am relieved to know he didn’t, remember? Mine is not one of those gripes about an artist painting his own paintings, a la Koons–who proudly doesn’t–or Hirst–who shamelessly doesn’t, except when he embarrassingly does. If any painter actually is a painter, it’s Gerhard Richter, amiright?
But Richter’s whole project seems based on the premise of not romanticizing the painter’s gesture or the artist’s subjectivity. It’s why he uses photographs as subject matter. And color charts. Mechanical. In the case of 4900 Colours, it’s why he outsourced the colors and placement to a randomizing computer program. [Not that he was remotely the first artist to deploy randomness or computer instructions in his work, of course.]
But wait, that’s not all! Here’s Benjamin Buchloh’s rather torturous description of the making of 4900 Colours:

Analogously to expanding the technological order of painting’s composition, Richter has also decided to dislodge the very process of manufacturing the painting from the hand to the mechanical devices of the spraygun handled by a technical collaborator. (The colour chips making up the paintings are individually spray-painted lacquer squares. Once solidified, they are inserted like elements of a mosaic into the prefixed structural arrangement. Each element consists of 25 coloured squares glued or taped onto the supporting Aludibond panel.) These decisions form the base for the permutability of the 4,900 colour chips and panels, since they were conceived from the start as a structure of permutation that could vary its own quantitative arrangements in 11 different presentational constellations.

[I know, I could have stopped before that last sentence, but that’d be like leaving a birthday party just as they’re bringing out the cake. Someone needs to endow an editorship at Harvard.]
Buchloch goes on to say Richter is not, like some artists [Moholy-Nagy, *cough* Judd], triumphantly declaiming “the superceding of painting’s artisanal past,” with his mechanicism; his is “a rather detached, not to say resigned, acceptance of the inevitable regimes of technological production.”
Sigh. Then if the facture-free production of 4,900 Colours is so intrinsic to both its “monotonous polychromy” and its–I love this–“almost Beckettian complacency in the exhaustion and hopelessness that technological progress without social transformation has inflicted on the subject,” why is the artist posing on with a brush as he gets ready to lay down the last stroke?
I think the explanation lies in the contradictory expectations that persist around Richter and his work. The Buchlohs among us want their Beckettian techno-anomie. The Joe Hage collector-fanboys among us want the intimacy of hanging around the studio and being present for The Moment of Creation. The gallerygoers among us want permission to just soak, guilt-free, in the beauty of a work. While the bookreaders and bloggers among us apparently just want to overanalyze a single photo in a single book on a single work.