At 84, the artist continues to add to his oeuvre, which encompasses colorful abstracts, black-and- white photo-realist works, conceptual sculptures and computer-generated prints
GERHARD RICHTER is sitting in the tiny library of New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery, trying to figure out how to talk about his newest abstract paintings, which hang in the brightly lit space on the other side of the wall. Thickly striated with brilliant blurs of color—blue, yellow, green, violet and red—made by dragging a giant squeegee across the canvas, their layers pulse with an ebullience that hasn’t marked his work for decades. Perhaps that’s why the artist, long renowned for being squeamish about interviews, has decided to “surrender,” as he jokes, to this one. Even though “it’s fantastic to be asked, because it shows interest, I feel very incompetent to answer,” he says in thickly German-accented English by way of explaining his chronic reluctance.
At 84, the man considered by many to be the world’s greatest living painter—and its priciest, too, at least at auction, where his record stands at $46.4 million for 1986’s Abstraktes Bild, just behind Jeff Koons’s $58.4 million sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange)—is still vigorously creating work. But before he created these paintings, he had barely put brush to canvas in four years. Today, though the show’s official opening is some days off, the gallery is crowded with critics, curators and collectors hoping to land one of the new creations. Richter confesses that he hates the hoopla surrounding his shows. “The worst thing is the dinner afterward. Sometimes I don’t go. Even when I was young, sometimes I didn’t go.” Yet he always finds it thrilling to see the work in the gallery: “This is fantastic, ja.”
Richter’s third wife, the artist Sabine Moritz, 46, is sitting beside him, watching protectively. (He’s painted her so many times, suffused in Vermeer-like light, in 1994’s Lesende (Reader), or nursing their first son in the 1995 series S. mit Kind (S. with Child), that her presence seems oddly familiar.) Richter initially comes across as demure and polite, with cropped gray hair, a rumpled gray suit and a formal, professorial mien. Occasionally he speaks through a translator. But he can also be playful, interspersing conversation with emotive ja’s, then erupting into wry asides and hearty laughter.