RICHTER, GERHARD
1932 Dresden

Title: 2.2.89.
Date: 1989.
Technique: Oil on paper.
Mounting: Mounted on card.
Measurement: 21 x 29.5 cm.
Notation: Dated and signed on the backing board beneath the sheet : 2.2.89 Richter. Twice dated and signed verso on the backing board centre: 2.2.89 2.2.89 Richter.
Frame: Framed. Not examined out of the frame.


The work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Dr. Dietmar Elger of the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden, dated 12.3.2025



Provenance:
- - Private collection North Rhine-Westphalia



- A precious gem in a delicate, nuanced palette

- The painting marks a new beginning in abstract painting following the completion of the well-known Stammheim cycle

- The abstract works from this period are among the artist’s most sought-after pieces internationally



Biographical Milestones and Artistic Position

For more than seven decades, Gerhard Richter has been painting, and his work has lost none of its relevance or aesthetic precision to this day. With remarkable ease, he moves between styles—shifting from figuration to abstraction, from photographic source material to free artistic invention, from grey monochrome to opulent color.

Born in Dresden in 1932 and raised in Upper Lusatia, Richter initially trained in Zittau as a sign, stage, and commercial painter and worked as an assistant at the municipal theater there. He subsequently studied mural painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, which led to his first commissioned works.

The artist’s “second life” began with his move to West Germany shortly before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. At the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he continued his studies under Karl Otto Götz and gained widespread recognition as early as the 1960s for his photo-based paintings. From 1971 to 1993, Richter himself taught as Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

While his education in East Germany had confronted him with the principles of Socialist Realism, the West opened access to an artistic environment shaped by abstraction, Fluxus, and expanded concepts of art. Richter’s own artistic position developed with remarkable confidence across stylistic boundaries.



The Stammheim Cycle as Turning Point and New Beginning

The artist precisely dates the present work to February 2, 1989. This date holds particular significance, as the work was created immediately following the completion of the cycle 18 October 1977, through which Richter intensely engaged, between March and November 1988, with the deaths of members of the RAF in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison.

The Stammheim cycle marks a profound turning point within Richter’s oeuvre. Against this backdrop, Richter himself acknowledged that it was initially difficult to return to abstract painting. For a period, the spectacular chromatic intensity of his work gave way to a more restrained, at times melancholic tonality—a mood that also permeates the present painting.



A Painting of Illuminated Color

A nuanced spectrum of warm yellows and golden tones unfolds across the surface in subtle gradations, lending the small-format work an inner luminosity. Linear structures intertwine with softly flowing bands of color that veil the pictorial ground like a mysterious curtain.

The illusionistic sense of spatial depth recedes in importance; instead, the picture plane becomes perceptible as an open, flat field of activity. The indeterminacy of form—the merely suggested—defines the painting’s weightless effect: forms emerge, withdraw once more, and dissolve within the painterly process into a poetic ephemerality shaped by chance.

Doris Hansmann



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#Gerhard Richter #Abstraction #Capitalistic Realism #New Realism #Germany #Post-War Art #Works on paper #Abstract #Oil #1980s #Post War.







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