Funken
Funken
Signed Print
Gerhard Richter
£4,150-£6,000 VALUE (EST.)
$8,000-$11,500 VALUE (EST.)
$7,000-$10,000 VALUE (EST.)
¥35,000-¥50,000 VALUE (EST.)
€4,800-€7,000 VALUE (EST.)
$40,000-$60,000 VALUE (EST.)
¥720,000-¥1,040,000 VALUE (EST.)
$5,000-$7,500 VALUE (EST.)
This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.
Lithograph, 1970
Signed Print Edition of 200
H 32cm x W 47cm
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Auction Results
| Auction Date | Auction House | Artwork | Hammer Price | Return to Seller | Buyer Paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 2021 | Germann Auctions - Switzerland | Funken - Signed Print | |||
| December 2018 | Sotheby's New York - United States | Funken - Signed Print | |||
| May 2015 | Lempertz, Cologne - Germany | Funken - Signed Print | |||
| September 2013 | Christie's London - United Kingdom | Funken - Signed Print | |||
| June 2012 | Germann Auctions - Switzerland | Funken - Signed Print | |||
| October 2010 | Ketterer Kunst Hamburg - Germany | Funken - Signed Print | |||
| May 2010 | Germann Auctions - Switzerland | Funken - Signed Print |
Meaning & Analysis
Funken is a signed lithograph by Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter. Created in 1970, the artwork captures the bright and buoyant side of Richter’s creative practice before it moves in the direction of sombreness and monochrome in 1974.
The artwork represents Richter’s attempt to trace the movement of the light against the background of a bright, cloudless sky. Although the exact nature of the titular ‘sparkle’ is hard to pin down, the artist appears to have experimented with the exposure time of the original photograph in order to capture a sense of dynamism and movement. The intense colours of Funken contrast jarringly with Richter’s later works, such as the Grey Paintings series, in which his doubt in the possibility of knowing and representing reality translates into a radical reduction of the visual language.
As so often in Richter’s works, the techniques of overpainting and blurring have been employed in Funken, reflecting Richter’s desire to deconstruct traditional artistic methods. Richter commented on the function of the blurring technique: “I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”
