Art 8/9 Results Show all results
Chronology 1 Result
1932: 9 February: Gerhard Richter is born in Dresden to Hildegard Richter, a bookseller, and Horst Richter, a school teacher.
1933: 30 January: Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor.
1936: the Richter family moves to Reichenau, a town close to Dresden, today known as Bogatynia in Poland. Richter's sister Gisela is born.
1939: 1 September: the German invasion of Poland begins; Horst is drafted in to the military and sent to the Eastern Front.
1942: Richter joins the Pimpfe, an organisation that[...]
Quotes 3/4 Results Show all results
In 1976 you began to paint abstract pictures, because you wanted something that you couldn't visualize in advance. In doing so, you invented a method that was absolutely new to you. Was that an experiment of some kind?
Yes. I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming – that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original – then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.
1,024 Colours in 4 Permutations
In order to represent all extant colour shades in one painting, I worked out a system which – starting from the three primaries, plus grey – made possible a continual subdivision (differentiation) through equal gradations. 4 x 4 = 16 x 4 = 64 x 4 = 256 x 4 = 1,024. The multiplier 4 was necessary because I wanted to keep the image size, the square size and the number of squares in a constant proportion to each other. To use more than 1,024 tones (4,096, for instance) seemed pointless, since the difference between one shade and the next would no longer have been detectable.
The arrangement of the colours on the squares was done by a random process, to obtain a diffuse, undifferentiated overall effect, combined with stimulating detail. The rigid grid precludes the generation of figurations, although with an effort these can be detected. This aspect of artificial naturalism fascinates me – as does the fact that, if I had painted all the possible permutations, light would have taken more than 400 billion years to travel from the first painting to the last. I wanted to paint four large, colourful pictures.
Turning to the colour-classification methodology:
The starting point are the four pure colours red, yellow, green and blue; their in-between shades and scales of brightness result in colour schemes containing 16, 64, 256 and 1,024 shades. More colours would be pointless because it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between them clearly.
