Two complementary styles dominate Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre: a
distinctive, process-oriented type of abstraction and a cold, if
ingenious, version of superrealism. As its title indicated,
“Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings”
offered a capsule history of the artist’s efforts in
abstraction, leaving his realist paintings, as it were, out of
the picture. Ohne Titel (1965), the oldest work on view, looked
nothing like the later, striated, layered, and color-filled
abstractions we associate with Richter. In it, three strips of
gray-and-white-painted canvas, arranged in a simple construction
resembling two columns and a transom, are affixed to the center
of a small, white-primed canvas. Clearly indebted to minimalism,
the work stands apart like an adopted child from the family of
paintings, completed in the 1980s and 1990s, which form the
show’s core.
The abstract works from the last twenty years are so
rooted in process that, I would argue, they must be seen in
groups. Richter doesn’t seem to aim for solitary masterpieces.
Instead, he has staked out a characteristic mode, with each
canvas presenting a number of technical variations on his basic
style. The generic, numbered titles themselves emphasize the
serial nature of the project. All the paintings start with
multiple strata of glistening paint, which are either applied by
laying pigment on a glass plate and then pressing it onto the
canvas (and pulling away parts of layers when removing the glass)
or by pulling selected layers away with tape. Chaotic, blurred,
and shot-through both with jangling and complementary colors,