RICHTER, GERHARD
1932 Dresden

Title: Untitled (432/7).
Date: 1978.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 28.5 x 40 cm.
Notation: Signed and dated verso upper right: Richter, '78. Equipped with work number next to it: 432/7.



Provenance:
- Gallery Fred Jahn, Munich

- Gallery Bernd Lutze, Friedrichshafen (label)

- Bärbel Grässlin Gallery, Frankfurt a. M.


Exhibition:
- Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1978

- Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1978/79

- Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1982

- Mannheimer Kunstverein, 1982

- Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich 1982

- Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples 1983

- Galerie Bernd Lutze, Friedrichshafen 1985


Literature:
- Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.): Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné 1961-1993, vol.III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, cat. rais. no. 432-7, ill.

- Exhib. cat. Gerhard Richter. Abstrakte Bilder 1976 bis 1981, Kunsthalle Bielefeld 1982, ill. p. 24

- Exhib. cat. Gerhard Richter. Bilder/Paintings 1962-1985, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1986, p. 389, ill. p. 211, ill.



- Colour-intensive painting that explores the tension between control and chance, calculation and intuition

- From a significant period in the artist’s career, during which Richter consolidated his abstract painting style

- Museum-quality work in a cabinet format with an impressive exhibition history

- The Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris has dedicated an extensive retrospective to the artist in 2025/26



Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre ranks among the most multifaceted positions in German art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His body of work ranges from optically “blurred” photo-paintings to monochrome grey canvases, overpainted works in red, blue, and yellow, color charts based on industrial sample cards, landscapes, monumentally scaled color-intensive abstractions, and mirror and glass works—including the celebrated window in Cologne Cathedral. Richter breathed new life into the long-declared dead medium of painting, thereby securing an outstanding position within art history.

Following training as a stage and advertising painter in Zittau between 1949 and 1951, Richter enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. Shortly before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he relocated to West Germany, where he continued his studies at the Düsseldorf Academy under Karl Otto Götz, later returning to teach there himself as Professor of Painting.

The painting Untitled (432/7) was created in 1978 and belongs to an early phase of Richter’s work in which figurative representation increasingly receded in favor of abstract compositions. This small-format work is an impressive example of the process-oriented nature of Richter’s painting. Broad, horizontally applied bands of yellow paint extend across the surface, revealing glimpses of underlying paint layers in exposed areas. Lines and planes are not interwoven but layered atop one another; the surface appears dynamic and stratified. Traces of painterly intervention—situated in the tension between control and chance—remain clearly visible.

The intensely luminous yellow, applied in subtle oscillating movements, radiates across the predominantly darker ground and lends the surface rhythmic tension and energetic density, while the underlying layer oscillates between soft, blurred passages and cracked, rugged textures. Materiality, color, and pictorial structure move to the forefront in this phase of Gerhard Richter’s practice: painting is understood not as representation, but as an open visual event—one that reflects upon the very act of painting itself and continually re-examines its possibilities.



Estimated shipping costs for this lot:
The lot is unsuitable for parcel shipping. Transport only by shipping company after consultation following the auction.

additional shipping insurance


Shipping insurance

up to total invoice amount of 25,000 Euros: max. 41.65 Euro

over a total invoice amount of 25,000 Euros: 1.8 o/oo


USA by individual arrangement after the auction.




#Gerhard Richter #Abstraction #Capitalistic Realism #New Realism #Germany #Post-War Art #Abstract #Painting #1970s #Oil #Post War.







In accordance with §26 UrhG (German Copyright Act), VAN HAM is obliged to pay a statutory resale royalty on the sale proceeds of all original works of fine art and photography whose authors have not been deceased for 70 years prior to the end of the calendar year of the sale. The buyer shall contribute 1.5% of the hammer price to this fee.