Gerard Richter
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Over the past few days, I have been exploring with only 2 colours - black and white. I was trying to challenge myself to rid most of everything I produced of colour for one week. Initially, it was a very surreal experience - black and white can be graphic and bold, yet shades of grey can be serene and soft. It forced me to see the world in, literally, black and white. However, I also quickly became tired of the lack of colour. I don’t usually remember my dreams very much, but I suppose my inner psyche yearned for colour so much that I began dreaming in vivid colours - kaleidoscopic colours so saturated and rich that I began thinking of colour in a whole different way. It was a very interesting experience, albeit one that I would not subject myself to again in the future.
“Gerhard Richter is one of the world’s greatest living artists and perhaps its greatest living painter. Since the early 1960s, he has tirelessly explored the medium of painting… 4900 Colours is a major new work comprising bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid to create a field of kaleidoscopic colour. The 196 square panels of 25 coloured squares can be reconfigured in a number of variations, from one large-scale piece to multiple, smaller paintings.”
“4900 Colours is parallel to Richter’s design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, which replaced the stained glass that was destroyed in World War II. The window, unveiled in August 2007, comprises 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 colours that are derived from the palette of the original Medieval glazing. The Seemingly arbitrary distribution of colours was generated using a specially developed computer programme and this renewed interest in using chance to define composition led the artist to develop the concept for 4900 Colours.”
“Richter produced the first in his series of grid paintings in 1966 in which he replicated, in large scale, industrial colour charts produced by paint manufacturers. As with his photo-paintings, the use of found material as a source removed the subjective compositional preferences of the artist, however, the Colour Chart Paintings took this a step further, eradicating any hierarchy of subject or representational intent, and focusing on colour to create an egalitarian language of art.”
Text sourced from Art Tattler.