Schweitzer Alpen II - A1 - B3 (complete set)
Schweitzer Alpen II - A1 - B3 (complete set)
Signed Print
Gerhard Richter
70 x 70cm, Edition of 50, Screenprint, 1969
£110,000-£170,000
$210,000-$320,000 Market Value Indicator
$210,000-$320,000 Market Value Indicator
¥1,000,000-¥1,550,000 Market Value Indicator
€130,000-€200,000 Market Value Indicator
$1,170,000-$1,810,000 Market Value Indicator
¥22,970,000-¥35,510,000 Market Value Indicator
$150,000-$230,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Schweizer Alpen II – A1 – B3 is the complete set of six screenprints by Gerhard Richter, produced in 1969 and signed in an edition of fifty. Part of the Swiss Alps series, each print presents an extreme close-up view of Alpine mountain terrain – sheer rock face, compacted snow, and deep shadow – reduced through the screenprint process to stark, graphic planes of black, grey, and white. Series II, at fifty impressions, is considerably rarer than its companion Series I.
The Schweizer Alpen series occupies a distinctive position within Richter's early print practice. Rather than the soft photographic blur of his contemporary Photo Paintings, the six prints in this set employ the screenprint medium to perform a different kind of transformation: photographic source material of close-up Alpine terrain is reduced to a limited palette of flat tonal values. White for snow and bright ice; mid-grey for exposed rock face; black for the deep shadow lodged in crevices and along ledges. The effect is simultaneously graphic and geological – the landscape entirely legible as Alpine terrain while the flat, posterised quality of the screenprint pushes the composition toward abstraction.
Crucially, no sky or horizon appears in any of the prints. The viewer is held entirely within the surface of the mountain – immersed in the pattern of rock and snow rather than placed at a contemplative distance from it. Diagonal ridges of snow cut across grey stone faces; dark marks cluster where ice meets rock. The series moves across different sections of the same high-mountain environment, maintaining systematic consistency of approach while varying the balance of light and shadow across each composition. At an edition of 50, the complete six-print set is among the rarest and most significant statements in Richter's early catalogue.
