Exceptional Works: Gerhard Richter 

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987

Oil on canvas  78 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches  200 x 200 cm

“The abstract works are my presence, my reality, my problems, my difficulties and contradictions.”

—Gerhard Richter

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exceptional example of Gerhard Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) at Art Basel 2025. Executed in 1987, this painting dates to one of the most important periods in the development of this series. Measuring two meters square and rendered in a nuanced palette in which broad vertical strokes of blue, gray, and red are overlaid with energetic layers of scraped paint in a panoply of hues, this painting exemplifies the formal and conceptual innovations that Richter achieved with his Abstrakte Bilder in the 1980s.

Celebrated worldwide as one of the most important artists of his generation, Richter (b. 1932) has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to painting and its formal and conceptual possibilities. In his work, dual modes of representation and abstraction fundamentally question the way in which we relate to images. His vast oeuvre is grounded in deeply nuanced investigations of history, memory, and representation.

Gerhard Richter, Cologne, Germany, 1989. Photo by Chris Felver/Getty Images

Begun in 1976, Richter’s momentous Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) are central to his practice, mediating the primary strains of his oeuvre: painting and photography, and figuration and abstraction. Highly stratified in composition, the works marked a pivotal shift from the artist’s monochromatic and reductivist canvases of the late 1960s and early 1970s, introducing a new mode of composition that is both arbitrary and deliberately planned. In these paintings, Richter introduced a collage technique in which he pieced together painterly layers and shadows from several photographic sources.

By the 1980s, as critic Robert Storr notes, “The technique in Richter’s Abstract Pictures had shifted from rendering alone to the direct application of paint with a brush or hard edge over rendered passages, and from there progressively toward paintings whose visible layers were almost entirely gestural or pigment loaded,” gradually obliterating any illusionistic underpainting on his canvases. Carefully constructed and highly analytical, Richter’s abstract compositions are integral to his investigation of painting.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987 (detail)

“Richter applied somewhat less pressure on the squeegee for the last layer of paint, so that it only adhered to elevated spots. This careful application of paint closed off the Abstract paintings from the viewer as if with a delicate veil.”

—Kerstin Küster, curator

Richter painting with a squeegee tool in his Cologne studio, 1994. Photo by Benjamin Katz

Executed in 1987, this painting dates to one of the most important periods in the development of the Abstrakte Bilder: in the late 1980s, Richter adopted the use of massive, straight-edged squeegees as his main painting tool—sometimes standing on a ladder in order to reach all the way across his large canvases—which allowed him to create marks imbued with an inherent element of chance while still being physically controlled by the artist’s hand.

Here, Richter’s layered and aleatory application of paint has created the visual impression of distinct halves—one brighter in hue and contrast, the other more muted in its coloration—that divide the composition. These two “panes” harken to Richter’s understanding of painting as a window onto the world—a continuation of the art-historical notion first posited during the Renaissance era by theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472).

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987 (detail)

“Ever since [Alberti], this notion of nature as a model has been an ideal of art theory that painters strove to achieve, abandoned only with the advent of cubist modernism. Richter’s…concept focuses on the depiction of a random, limited section of reality seen through a window frame. He does not necessarily regard this kind of detail as representing an ideal image of nature. Yet its detail, complexity, and randomness could be seen to contain a truth and a rightness which Richter draws on as the model for his paintings, and which can do more justice to the notion of our current reality than can all of the traditional theories about the aesthetics of art.”

—Dietmar Elger, art historian and Richter scholar

Cover and interior page showing the present work, from “An Artist Beyond Isms,” Richter’s 2002 profile in The New York Times Magazine

This painting was selected by the artist to be prominently illustrated as a representative example of his abstracts in his major 2002 profile in The New York Times Magazine. The article was published on the occasion of Richter’s traveling retrospective, which opened that same year at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and featured a number of related abstract paintings from the late 1980s.

Richter produced only one other two-meter-square painting in 1987 and 1988; that work (CR 649-2) resides in the collection of the Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987. Collection Pola Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan

“This is one of the finest, most beautiful and strangely moving exhibitions of the work of a living painter in years… His abstractions constantly short-circuit one expectation or another—about elegance, inspiration or technical consistency…. Good abstraction is mysterious, difficult and unpredictable.”

—Michael Kimmelman, critic, in a review of Richter’s 2002 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Related late-1980s abstract paintings by Richter of comparable scale are held in prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago; Fondation Beyeler, Basel/Riehen; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, United Kingdom.

David Zwirner at Art Basel