Following the remarkable price of $32.2 million (£21.3 million) achieved for Abstraktes Bild (809-4) last Friday evening at Sotheby’s London, which established the world record for a work by Gerhard Richter, as well as a new benchmark for the work of any living artist at auction, Sotheby’s is pleased to announce the sale of one of the most elegant and fully resolved abstractions by the artist ever to appear at auction.Abstraktes Bild (712) from 1990 was painted at a crucial moment in the artist’s career and epitomizes his mastery of the art of abstraction (est. in excess of $16 million). The Abstraktes Bild paintings are conceived through an extensive, time-consuming and labor intensive process in which the introduction of “chance” produces a calculated and magnificent chaos of color and structure.
Since 1960 Richter has produced an astonishingly diverse range of paintings including a number devoted to exploring the role of painting in relation to other visual cultures such as photography. In addition toAbstraktes Bild, two photorealist portraits of the artist’s then wife, Isa Genzken, entitled I.G. (ests. $3/4 million each) will also be offered in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 13 November 2012 in New York.
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