At one of the annual spring auctions at Sotheby’s in New York, a painting of 4096 colors by the German painter Gerhard Richter was sold for 21.8 million dollars or 20 million euros. Richter is one of the most expensive selling living artists.
This is his last work from a sought-after series of color plates from 1974 and also inspired his famous Cologne Cathedral window.
As reported by the German press agency dpa, Richter was inspired by the idea of color plates when he saw examples of sample colors in a paint shop in Düsseldorf, Germany. Then it dawned on him that these were perfect pictures.
He copied the color cards, but assembled the color fields differently. Between 1966 and 1974 he painted three different series of panels, each more complex.
Last October, Richter’s painting 192 colors fetched an estimated £18.1 million, or around €20.5 million, at Sotheby’s in London. The 4,096-color artwork has been exhibited in Chicago, San Francisco, London’s Tate Modern, and Berlin’s National Museums.
One of the most influential artists in the worldAt 91, Richter is considered one of the world’s most influential artists, and auction house Sotheby’s – like other auction houses such as rival Christie’s – is selling hundreds of works by major artists in May.
Sotheby’s announced that the spider sculpture created in 1996 by a French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), sold for a record 32.8 million dollars (close to 30 million euros).
Although Gerhard Richter’s works of art fetch astronomically high prices, or precisely because of this, some time ago he expressed complete disagreement with this development of the art market. “Fearful Development,” he told Die Zeit newspaper. He added that it is about “pure cult of personality”. He is convinced that art is just a spectacle, because it has absolutely nothing to do with art.
The market is not yet saturated with Richter’s works of artBorn in 1932 in Dresden, East Germany, Gerhard Richter left his hometown just a few months before the Berlin Wall was erected, but as a result he never saw his parents again. After moving to Düsseldorf and encountering Western art, he devoted his career to exploring established painting genres.
Among his most recognizable works are probably family portraits, which partly give the impression of old, dirty newspaper clippings, with which their author in a way questions the role of his own family and the whole of Germany in the Second World War. Such are the pictures, for example Aunt Mariannewho was mentally ill and was interned by the Nazis, and Uncle Rudiwho was a Nazi soldier and fell in battle.
He moved to Cologne in 1983, and 1995 brought a turning point, as MoMA paid him three million dollars for a series of paintings entitled Oct. 18, 1977. The series was created in response to the trial and brutal execution of a group of young German anarchists and terrorists.
In 2015, his work entitled Abstract painting from 1986 was sold at an auction in London for a record 41 million euros, which thus became the most expensive painting by a living artist sold at auction. It is a colorful painting from 1986. Richter created more than 3,000 paintings during his long career, but almost 40 percent of them hang in museums, so the market is not yet saturated with his works.
Source: Rtvslo
