Vermalung (grau)
Vermalung (grau)
Signed Mixed Media
Gerhard Richter
40 x 40cm, Edition of 150, Mixed Media, 1971
£20,000-£30,000
$40,000-$60,000 Market Value Indicator
$35,000-$60,000 Market Value Indicator
¥180,000-¥270,000 Market Value Indicator
€23,000-€35,000 Market Value Indicator
$210,000-$310,000 Market Value Indicator
¥4,200,000-¥6,300,000 Market Value Indicator
$26,000-$40,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Vermalung (grau) (Painting-Over, Grey) is a mixed media work by Gerhard Richter, made in 1971. Rather than a print, it is a physical painted surface: grey oil paint applied by brush over printed paper, the gestural marks visible as slightly lighter and darker passages within the overall cool grey-blue ground. Each copy in this signed edition of 150 is individually painted by hand, carrying its own particular configuration of marks.
The Vermalung works occupy a distinctive position in Richter's practice. Where his Photo Paintings engage with photographic images by reproducing them – deliberately intact – onto canvas, the Vermalongen do the opposite: they take printed matter and paint over it, extinguishing the content beneath a layer of grey or brown. The act of painting is here an act of erasure.
Vermalung (grau) is the cooler, more restrained of the two colour variants. The grey Richter uses is the same grey that runs through much of his work of the late 1960s and early 1970s: neutral, uncommitted, the colour of pre-colour photography, of fog, of the interval between two states. Applied in flowing, curving brushstrokes that accumulate across the near-square surface, the paint both covers and declares itself – the marks are legible as marks, the gesture present within the grey field. What lies beneath the printed paper is gone. What remains is grey: undifferentiated, assertive, and deliberately inconclusive.
