Abstract Painting 610-1 

Gerhard Richter made this painting with oil on canvas. Oil paint can be pushed around on the surface of the canvas, built up, and scraped away. If we look closely, we can see Richter exploiting all these possibilities. He's not just applying paint, but intervening with it, interrupting the application. In this way, it's almost like he is performing a kind of archeology on the canvas, revealing traces of what has been laid down before. The squeegee marks, in particular, are a signature. It's almost a mechanical gesture, and it has the effect of flattening the image, disrupting the illusion, and bringing us back to the fact that this is, after all, just oil paint. Richter's process is very much in keeping with the times. It brings a sensibility of production into what we might think of as the rarefied domain of abstract painting.