25 Colours 2007

Gerhard Richter’s “25 Colours” is a tight grid of bright, flat squares that lock into place like a digital screen. I can imagine Richter standing back, squinting at the canvas, and thinking about Mondrian or Albers—artists who also loved color and the grid. It's like he's asking, 'How can I take this established language and push it somewhere new?' The colors, though bright, are oddly muted, like they’ve been filtered through a screen. I see a dialogue happening between the hand-painted and the mechanically reproduced. There’s something very calculated about the way these colours are arranged, but I also get a sense of chance and randomness, as if he threw darts at a colour chart and went from there. It makes me think about the relationship between control and accident, order and chaos, and the way that artists play with these ideas to make something fresh and alive. It's like a puzzle.