“I am primarily painting from photographs these days (from illustrated magazines but also from family photos), in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product (the “second-hand world” in which we live), I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization (deformation in form and color) contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject (generally stylization becomes the central problem which obscures everything else (object, subject), it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo.”

Gerhard Richter
Abstraktes Bild
signed, inscribed and dated ‘809-4 Richter 1994’ (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
88 5⁄8 x 78 3⁄4 in. (225 x 200 cm.)
Painted in 1994.
Price realised
USD 38,175,000