Besen 1984

Gerhard Richter made this unnamed painting, "Besen", and right away you can see it’s about layers, like he's digging through something. The black lines feel like erasures but somehow they are also like the main event of the painting. Then you notice the colors underneath. There is a kind of scraping and layering, but each color also feels really precise. Look at that green at the bottom left, and how it meets the red brushstroke next to the deep blue. It's like a dance between chaos and control. Richter's paintings are a lot about the push and pull between accident and intention, and you can see that here. There is a conversation between the different colours that reminds me of the way that Francis Bacon put colours together in his paintings. Ultimately, it’s up to you to figure out what it all means, or maybe it’s just about how it feels.