Gerhard Richter Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019 - 2024, installation view, Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italy, Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2024 (11122024) Photo: Matteo D’Eletto, M3 Studio

A Thought Between the Two Lines:

Gerhard Richter and the State of Abstraction

by Sara Buoso

Gerhard Richter, Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, 2019-24 (still) Digital projection (color, sound, 36 min.) © Gerhard Richter 2024 (28102024)

From the pictorial series Abstract Bild, (724-4) 2008-2013 to the film Moving Picture (946-3), Kyoto Version, 2024, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, Dresden, lives and works in Cologne) has deployed a new definition for what abstraction is in contemporary visual arts. This article intends to trace the fundamental contribution that Richter has addressed in relation to the legacy of abstract and non-representational art, suggesting a reading of his work through the lens of neuroaesthetics, retrospectively referencing to a series of key exhibitions, 2014-2024, which has consecrated the artist internationally.

“Beyond Painting, there is always a line.” No other statement is more appropriate to describe Gerhard Richter’s majestic oeuvre. The artist officially began to paint in 1962, with the work Table [CR:1], firmly positioning his practice within the legacy of non-representational art. However, since his early works, Richter has demonstrated that his relationship with painting was not meant to be exclusive or autoreferential. By rejecting the notion of the artistic object, he has consistently chosen to foreground a concept of the role that images (Bilder) can assume in shaping a contemporary visual imaginary. To pursue such an investigation, the artist opted for experimenting with different mediums other than painting, primarily photography because, to paraphrase the artist’s words, this medium can narrate a truthful view of the world. Richter employs the photographic image as the most objective filter to observe reality. This approach helps to explain why Richter is a key figure for understanding the pictorial turn that distinguished contemporary art and visual culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, it is no surprise that Richter’s interest in non-representational and non-objective art has informed his personal interpretation of abstraction. But whilst it is true that in a broader sense, the artist understands abstraction as a non-iconic position, it is also evident that the artist’s practice differs significantly from the posture historically assumed by geometric, expressive, concrete, kinetic, programmable, and radical abstract schools of thought. One of the most notable aspects of Richter’s work in this regard is his rejection of dichotomic categories which he translates into an interplay between reductive forms mirrored between the sensorial and the cerebral realms and, without hierarchy, merging into a synesthetic experience. This article suggests a reading of the abstract pictorial turn initiated by Richter through an analysis of his work with reference to the film Moving Picture (946-3), Kyoto Version, presented at Gagosian gallery, Rome, in 2024-2025.

Gerhard Richter, Tisch (Table), 1962, Oil on canvas, 35 3/8 x 44 1/2 inches (90 x 113 cm), Private Collection, © Gerhard Richter 2023 (16032023)

What is truly a line? Graphically speaking, we may refer to the intimate and meditative exhibition Gerhard Richter: Drawings, 1999-2021, HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery, 2021, which paid homage to the artist’s interpretation of the line by presenting a collection of drawings dated 1999-2021 and exhibited during the pandemic era. The works are studies for spatial compositions marked by strokes of graphite that articulate a becoming of nuances and erasures in a free interplay and reposition the fundamental role of the line and the sign in relation to the practice of drawing.

More widely, however, in Richter’s oeuvre line transcends the marking of an inscription to assume an intellectual value. This is not new to the language of abstraction, but Richter’s approach to the inscription of a line resonates more contemporaneously with the statement of neurobiologist and scholar Semir Zeki who, in the essay Art and the Brain, 1999, states how the line epitomizes the reduction of complex forms to an essential trait as an operation of the intellect, an operation resulting as the most basic visual stimulus and perception.

The first two minutes of the thirty-six-minute film Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version consist of the projection of a series of multiple horizonal bands ranging in tones of deep green, pink, red, and yellow, configuring a striated plane framed as a filmic image. The video-work builds on the artist’s pictorial investigation initiated for the series Strips, 2011-2016, part of a wider pictorial series titled Abstract Bild (724-4), 2008-2013, that also exists in sculptural forms with the piece Strip-Tower, presented at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2023. In my experience of Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, these lines soon reveal their instrumental function as if hiding the colored patterns moving homogenously on the surface of the video-image. This results from an artistic process in which the artist makes digital photographic replicas of his abstract paintings. By manipulating these photographic images, the artist initiates a process of replicating the images along an axis resulting in a redoubled, mirrored, enlarged and multiplied configuration, ultimately reassembled as a digital moving image. As in Richter’s paintings, these lines are meant to diffract and expand the visual field symmetrically whilst allowing micro and macro color patterns to occupy the entire surface of his filmic image.

Gerhard Richter, Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, still, 2019-2024; digital projection, color, sound, duration 36 minutes) © Gerhard Richter 2024 (28102024). Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

It may be relevant here to cite another work which employs a similar process and technique. The series Tapestries, consisting of four works titled Abdu, Iblan, Musa, and Yusuf, from 2009, exhibited at Gagosian gallery, London, 2014, uses a similar Rorschach-like technique to multiply forms and patterns from the original canvases, weaving them together on a mechanical jacquard loom to configure a new sense of abstraction. It may also be relevant to mention the squeegee technique employed by the artist since the early 1980s, a technique which radically challenges the modes of pictorial composition. By superseding the subjective or expressionist interest in the action of the brushstroke with this technique, Richter suggests that abstraction is the result of a clear and transparent action that crosses the vertical and the horizontal lines of composition and is grounded in a close relationship between the artist’s intention and the technology of the chosen medium. In Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version, this crossing is evident in the symmetrical posture of the video-composition where the surfing of colored patterns gradually appears to connotate the interwoven texture of a moving image whilst projecting a psychic and kaleidoscopic visual experience repeated in a digital loop. In this view, the acts of redoubling, mirroring, expanding, and replicating patterns along a central axis make up an interplay that contrasts with the classical principles of representation, and these features justify Richter’s interest in non-representational art. With this process, the artist hybridly questions the principles of abstract composition and mediums, formulating a new personal grammar for the language of abstraction—lines, axes, patterns, color, texture, image—which is conveyed not as a single image but as a series of patterns repeated as multiples. Richter’s abstract images constitute an event revealed as a sequence of visual patterns appearing perceptually and cerebrally onto the surface of the screen whilst being inscribed by a line, also mirroring an aesthetic affinity between the ways through which images are constructed and the ways through which the plasticity of the mind operates synergically.

Color (and the perception of it) is a fundamental principle (and a primary visual stimulus) of Richter’s oeuvre. Beyond any form and beyond any motion, for Richter, color allows any visual experience to expand in terms of sensory perception, reaching an immersive dimension in the film Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version which was presented on a seven-meter screen in a white cube gallery context. In this regard, it is highly significant to cite Richter’s investigation into the color field since his series of paintings Color Charts, 1996-1970s. For this series, the artist patented a grid, a system for relating to color consisting of four primary colors—red, yellow, green, blue—and grey, which can all be combined in terms of graduations and variations according to a numerical scheme—16, 24, 256, and 1024—the maximum of color combination perceivable by humans. Drawing from this method, the film Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version visualizes colored patterns evoking almost archetypal figures which timbrically reverberate in analogy with sound, merging into synesthesia. The film was made in collaboration with Corinna Belz and accompanied by a score for trumpet composed by Rebecca Saunders and recorded by Marco Blaauw and Sebastian Schottke. Whilst the assonance between painting and music explored by Richter is another citation for the history of abstraction, this assonance is also important to underscore the contrast between chance and order that exists in the artist’s oeuvre. To explain the relationship between painting and music in terms of abstraction, we may want to reference the several homages that Richter has paid to composer and artist John Cage who played a fundamental role in introducing indeterminacy in music as seen from his influence on the Fluxus movement in the 1960s. With reference to Cage’s compositions, Richter conceived the series of paintings Cage, 2006, six monochromes vibrating with diverse color gradients and timbres, presented for the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings, 2021, Gagosian Gallery, New York, and permanently exhibited at the TATE Modern, London. Not limited to this reference, Richter’s interest in the affinity between visual and musical composition is also traced back to his collaboration with Ensemble intercontemporain, and musician Steve Reich, jointly collaborating for the piece Piano Phase. Eight Lines. Reich/Richter, presented at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone of Rome in 2021, where the artist presented a scenographic abstract piece mirroring timbres of colored patterns with sound, jointly vibrating with kaleidoscopic and frenetic rhythms in a synesthetic aesthetic experience. Along this line of artistic investigation, the film Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version (2019–24) configures a synesthetic and immersive experience, articulating a rigorous symmetrical configuration between the timbres of sound and color with moments of chance through the movement of a digital image.

Gerhard Richter, Cage 2; 2006, 118 1/8 x 118 1/8 inches © Gerhard Richter 2020 (05102020) Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Moving between lines, colors, patterns, and textures, the film becomes a synesthetic experience joining sonorous and visual phenomena, mirroring archetypal images projected into an immersive dimension. As Zeki suggests, a fundamental difference exists between our biological functions and the idea of beauty as an abstract concept, and by touching on the temporal and cognitive flux of our sensory perception, this conflictual territory is key to a new idea of abstraction. This is a neuroaesthetic interpretation of abstraction, we may say, which touches on our inner vision and specifically our visual brain, making appearances change from image to image whilst projecting and visualizing cognitive patterns inscribed within the order of a line. To paraphrase Zeki, it could be said of Richter’s work that his oeuvre suggests a different function for art, a function that is an extension of the function of the brain, the seeking of knowledge in an ever-changing world, distilling the essence of lines, colors, patterns and textures through the frame of a moving filmic image.

Lines after lines, the film Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version (2019–24) ends with the return of a multiplicity of colored horizontal bands of lines. The relationship of lines to lines, to continue paraphrasing Zeki, is an indefinite relationship which incorporates quality, the incommensurable sum of the affinities perceived between that which we discern and that which exists within us, the brain and the intellect. Drawing from the fundamental relevance that the line has assumed within the history of abstract painting and the arts, Richter’s oeuvre significantly contributes to an intellectual and artistic interpretation of this trait as the most essential visual stimulus conveyed through the marking of an inscription. In other terms, his film mirrors a visual and an intellectual experience, both immersively neuroaesthetic, and an abstract image merging from the encounter between painting, photography, moving, and digital mediums and sound in a film. But ultimately, at the end of this projection, Richter’s images erase and dissolve. What remains is the surfing of the invisible into the field of the visible, leaving the inscription of a line.

Gerhard Richter, Moving Picture 946-3, (Trailer) sound by Rebecca Saunders with film by Corinna Belz and Gerhard Richter at Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele, Baden, Germany

Sara Buoso is an art critic and curator. She holds a PhD in Art Theory and History, Central Saint Martins, London, specializing in photology and practices of light. She is a lecturer in Contemporary Art History at AANT, Academy of Arts and New Technologies, and DAM, Digital Arts & Media Academy, Rome.

Sara Buoso