Ice 1981

This is Gerhard Richter’s ‘Ice’, and it's made with oil paint, which is the best, right? The surface is slick, like an accident! Imagine Richter in his studio, pushing pigment around, maybe even scraping it off and starting again. The way the red paint sits on top, almost like a big, flat, icy sheet, is great, and I love the way the yellows and whites look like they're melting and swirling below. Then little dabs of green, just to mess it up. It's a color world. Richter has a way of making paint do unexpected things. I always think, how does he get it to look like that? In ‘Ice’, it's like he's playing with the tension between control and chance, knowing when to let the paint do its thing and when to step in and guide it. Painters talk to each other through time, don't they? They show each other stuff. And what's so cool about painting is that it's always open to interpretation. It shifts and changes depending on who's looking at it.