Aladin (P11)

Dissimilar from works in Richter’s Colour Charts, Cage Prints, Cage f.ff and Cage Grid series, Aladdin (P11) is a digital print which sees Richter experiment with the creative possibilities of surface tension and painting. Where in his squeegee-based Cage paintings Richter might turn to the squeegee as a tool for applying and embellishing ‘classic’ tones of oil paint, here the artist sets his medium on the floor, diluting paints and allowing them to travel across its surface. Leaving the work open to error and serendipity alike, there is a deep sense of experimentation in its bright, dream-like composition.

As an art student of the 1950s, Richter is fiercely unusual. The recipient of an artistic training in socialist realist painting - an attribute unusual for an artist who moved to the ‘West’ in 1961 - Richter has nonetheless spent much of his career dealing with non-representation. Concerned chiefly with artistic process as opposed to likeness, Richter’s nature as a conceptual artist has led him to deal with a variety of intangible issues, ranging from memory to the divine. Always keen to disrupt tradition, Richter once confessed that his artistic practice has the ultimate goal of bringing about the ‘death’ of painting.