Detail

“Grey is welcome as the only possible equivalent to indifference, refusal to testify, lack of opinion, formlessness. Because, however, grey can only really exist as an idea, like formlessness and so on, I can only make a shade of colour that means grey but isn’t,” said painter Gerhard Richter in an interview in answer to a question about the meaning of the colour grey. Richter achieved recognition in the 1960s with a series of photo-realistic paintings. The pictures are restricted to grey and create the impression of being out-of-focus photographs. At the end of the 1960s he turned away from representational painting but nevertheless remained true to the colour grey. Richter then began a series of monochrome grey pictures which he continued into the mid-1970s. While the colour itself remains constant, the way it is applied is different: there are pictures that entrance with their extremely smooth application and others, such as the picture shown, "Grey No. 349/3", which has a markedly granular layer of colour. Making the picture in this way, as well as reducing it to a single colour, brings its materiality to the fore: the haptic quality of the picture allows it to become an object resembling a landscape. As Richter says: “There is no difference between a landscape and an abstract picture.”