Schwarz Rot Gold II
Schwarz Rot Gold II
Signed Mixed Media
Gerhard Richter
21 x 30cm, Edition of 64, Mixed Media, 1998
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Meaning & Analysis
Schwarz Rot Gold II is a Mixed Media work by Gerhard Richter, produced in 1998 and signed in an edition of sixty-four. Part of the Black Red Gold series, the work presents the three vertical bands of the German national flag – black, deep crimson, and bright gold – rendered in lacquered colour on separate glass panels mounted with small metal clips. The material construction of the work is as legible as its image.
The Schwarz Rot Gold series addresses one of the most charged visual symbols in modern European history: the tricolour of the German national flag. Richter – born in Dresden in 1932, raised under National Socialism, and emigrated from East Germany to West Germany in 1961 just months before the Berlin Wall went up – approaches the flag not as a site of easy sentiment but as an object weighted with the full complexity of twentieth-century German history.
In Schwarz Rot Gold II, three glass panels carry the flag's colours in their correct vertical order. The materiality of glass is integral to the work: it gives the lacquered colour a depth and faint luminosity that paint on paper cannot replicate, while the visible metal clips securing each panel make the work's construction explicit. This is not a seamless image of a flag but a constructed object that acknowledges its own making – a position consistent with Richter's longstanding refusal of illusion.
Produced in 1998, eight years after German reunification, the work reflects on what such a symbol now carries – and whether that weight has been resolved or simply redistributed.
