Funken

The artwork represents Richter’s attempt to trace the movement of the light against the background of a bright, cloudless sky. Although the exact nature of the titular ‘sparkle’ is hard to pin down, the artist appears to have experimented with the exposure time of the original photograph in order to capture a sense of dynamism and movement. The intense colours of Funken contrast jarringly with Richter’s later works, such as the Grey Paintings series, in which his doubt in the possibility of knowing and representing reality translates into a radical reduction of the visual language.

As so often in Richter’s works, the techniques of overpainting and blurring have been employed in Funken, reflecting Richter’s desire to deconstruct traditional artistic methods. Richter commented on the function of the blurring technique: “I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”