ArtDependence | Gerhard Richter's Final Color Chart Painting to Highlight Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction this May in NY

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Gerhard Richter first alighted on the Color Chart concept in 1966 and, over the following eight years, would go on the create a series of important works which now rank among the significant conceptual projects of the last century. The very last work in this celebrated series, 4096 Farben from 1974 – the importance of which is denoted in its appearance on the cover of the definitive Catalogue Raisonné of Richter’s work - will now come to auction for the first time in nearly 20 years at Sotheby’s New York May 18 with an estimate $18-25 million.

Gerhard Richter first alighted on the Color Chart concept in 1966 and, over the following eight years, would go on the create a series of important works which now rank among the significant conceptual projects of the last century. The very last work in this celebrated series, 4096 Farben from 1974 – the importance of which is denoted in its appearance on the cover of the definitive Catalogue Raisonné of Richter’s work - will now come to auction for the first time in nearly 20 years at Sotheby’s New York May 18 with an estimate $18-25 million.

The concept of the color chart and of this work were particularly significant to Richter, who would later take this painting as the inspiration for an ambitious commission he received to create a stained-glass window at Cologne Cathedral, unveiled in 2007 (pictured below). That window, a magnificent, monumental realization of 4096 Farben, now stands as an exact replica - in some 11 thousand squares of glass in 72 different colors - of the painting to be offered at Sotheby’s this May.

“I first came up with the idea for the color-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 color fields.”

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter’s Cologne Cathedral Window, the design of which is based directly on the present work.
Photo Credit: Chris Gascoigne

Monumental in scale, 4096 Farben measures eight feet in length and height and is one of just three Color Chart paintings to have been offered at auction in the last decade, the most recent of which, 192 Farben from 1966, realized $20.5 million in October last year – setting a new auction record for a work from this series.

4096 Farben was recently chosen as the cover of the artist’s Catalogue Raisonné, published by Dietmar Elger (pictured below), and has a remarkable exhibition history, hanging as the centerpiece of many of the artist’s most significant retrospectives, including his major 1988-1989 exhibition, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, which traveled tothe Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as the show, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, in London’s Tate Modern and the Staatliche Museen zu in Berlin from 2011-2012.

Richter described his Color Chart series as a “beautiful stroke of luck”, after he was initially inspired by the color cards he found in paint stores and thought them to be already perfect pictures. Between 1966 and 1974, Gerhard Richter painted three distinct series of Color Chart paintings, each progressing in complexity and chromaticity. While Richter’s inaugural Color Chart series reflected the ready-made quality of industrial paint charts together with the aesthetics of Pop and Minimalist art, by 1971, the artist had abandoned this structure, instead exploring a mechanically progressive series of grids to contain each cell of color.

The present work illustrated on the cover of Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 2: Nos. 199–388, 1968–1976, edited by Dietmar Elger.

Executed in 1974, 4096 Farben is the final painting in Richter’s third and most ambitious series of Color Charts, which occupied his practice between 1973 and 1974. In these works, Richter introduces greys and greens into his primary palette, and in doing so, multiplies the number of featured colors fourfold, creating 1024 distinct hues. The only work from the series in which Richter replicates each hue four times, 4096 Farben features the maximum number of color combinations before the difference between one hue and another dissolves before the viewer’s eye.

Testifying to the landmark significance of this series, Richter would later return to it over three decades later in 2007 by expanding upon it with 4900 Farben – now housed in the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris – as well as his celebrated Cologne Cathedral Window, which he designed by directly referencing the chromaticity of the present work.

The monumental work is also one of a limited number of paintings from the series remaining in private hands, with many of Richter’s Color Chart paintings residing in prestigious museum collections around the world, including: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; The Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; The MKM Museum, Duisburg, Germany; The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark; the esteemed Prada Collection, Milan, Italy; and more.

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