Schweizer Alpen II - A1
Schweizer Alpen II - A1
Signed Print
Gerhard Richter
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70 x 70cm, Edition of 50, Screenprint
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Meaning & Analysis
The work of seminal German artist Gerhard Richter, Schweizer Alpen II - A1 is part of the Swiss Alps collection. Issued in 1969 in a very limited edition of 50, the print is signed by the artist. A study of a mountainous landscape, Schweizer Alpen II - A1 sees Richter tease out a visual sense of the abstraction present in the natural world.
Like other works in the Swiss Alps collection, such as Schweizer Alpen II - A2, Schweizer Alpen II - B1, and Schweizer Alpen II - B2, this print is situated at the intersection between realism and abstraction. Like its close cousins, it sees Richter turn his hand to the depiction of a mountain scene in the Swiss Alps; copying the image from photograph - presumably filed away in his monumental photographic archive of Atlas - the artist opts for broad, gestural strokes of colour, which he uses to mark out the most prominent sections of the scene. Two contrasting monochromatic tones are used to ‘pick out’ a rocky, snow-covered arête, casting one side of the mountain in shadow.
Marked for its bold departure from photorealism, this print is testament to a methodological and thematic change in Richter’s œuvre during the late 1960s. During this period, Richter made a conscious departure from the historical portrait - a subject he tackled most famously in works such as Elisabeth II (1966) and Hund (1965). As these prints testify, his style around this period was staunchly semi-realist, and made continued use of the so-called ‘blur’ effect. In the mode of German Romantic painters, such as Caspar David Friedrich, Richter turned subsequently towards landscape. Working from photographs, he sustained a semi- or photorealist style, as is visible in the Canaries Landscapes collection. Here, however, Richter offers a foretelling of his later interest in Abstract painting, creating one of a number of impressionistic works that were to be ‘activated’ by the viewer’s gaze.