Tulpen (P17)
Tulpen (P17)
Unsigned Print
Gerhard Richter
36 x 41cm, Edition of 500, Giclée print, 1995
£6,000-£9,000
$11,500-$17,000 Market Value Indicator
$11,000-$17,000 Market Value Indicator
¥50,000-¥80,000 Market Value Indicator
€7,000-€10,500 Market Value Indicator
$60,000-$90,000 Market Value Indicator
¥1,260,000-¥1,890,000 Market Value Indicator
$8,000-$12,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Tulpen (P17) is a giclée print by Gerhard Richter, made in 1995. The work depicts a bunch of vivid yellow tulips gathered in a glass container, their stems fanning outward against a warm neutral background, a deep shadow falling to the right of the vase. Rendered with Richter's characteristic photographic blur, it belongs to the long series of Blumenstillleben – flower still lifes – running through his practice from the 1970s onwards. This edition of 500 is unsigned.
Richter began painting flowers in the early 1970s, drawn to a subject carrying centuries of art-historical freight precisely because he could approach it without sentimentality. The Blumenstillleben works occupy an uneasy middle ground: the subject is among the most conventionally beautiful in Western painting, and yet Richter's photographic blur strips the image of any romantic directness that genre usually carries. What remains is colour, form, and the faint quality of something remembered rather than observed in the present tense.
Tulpen (P17) exemplifies this. The yellow of the tulip heads is vivid – almost insistently so – but the blur absorbs the mass of blooms into an impression rather than a description. The glass container, reflecting green stems against teal-dark shadow, is barely readable as an object. The dark form at lower right pushes the composition off-centre and anchors it in a specific, unremarkable domestic light. The "P" designation indicates a publication print – editions produced to accompany catalogues or institutional projects – and the size of 500, alongside the unsigned status, reflects that broader distribution context. Within Richter's flower prints, Tulpen (P17) is among the more widely held, but the image itself is entirely characteristic of his still-life practice: warm, lucid, and quietly insistent on the gap between looking and knowing.
