Uran

By 1989, the Abstrakten Bilder – Richter's large-scale abstract canvases produced by dragging and scraping paint with a squeegee across the surface – had become one of the defining bodies of work in contemporary painting. Uran photographs one of these works in a way that renders the painted surface as an environment rather than a picture: the deep black mass at left, the cascading vertical drips and torn white edges, the sense throughout of some volatile process in suspension.

The title does significant work. Uranium – radioactive, unstable, the material at the centre of Cold War nuclear arsenals and the Soviet-directed mining operations that scarred the landscape of East Germany across four decades – inflects the abstract image with a specific weight. In 1989, as the GDR began to collapse, the Wismut uranium operation in Saxony and Thuringia, which had employed hundreds of thousands in near-total secrecy, was becoming visible for the first time. Whether the title is a direct reference or a resonance Richter allowed to stand, the pairing of image and word – a painting that looks like material melt, issued in the year the Wall fell – gives Uran a particular charge among his abstract print editions.