Cage Grid I Single Part L

The Cage Grid prints extend the visual language of Richter's Cage paintings into the print medium. Those six large canvases – made in response to John Cage's ideas about chance and the abandonment of compositional control – use the squeegee to generate surfaces that are physically produced but not aesthetically decided: marks made through a method rather than a sensibility.

Single Part L occupies a transitional position within the sixteen-panel grid – between the cooler, green-dominant panels at the grid's left and the warmer, yellow-centred panels to the right. That position is visible in its surface: the left zone carries red and dark green, warm and cool tones competing; the centre opens into yellow-olive with a density of squeegee activity – vertical and diagonal marks, overlapping layers, the paint built into a complex texture; the right half brightens through white passages that cut vertically down the composition. Glimpses of blue-grey appear in the upper left. A small loop or curl of paint is visible near the upper right edge – an incident that would count as an error in a conventionally composed work, and here stands as an unremarkable product of the process. L is among the most internally varied of the individual panels, holding something of the character of the full grid in a single cell.