Gerhard Richter's masterpiece 4096 Colours comes to auction in New York

Art Calendar, 20 April 2023

Gerhard Richter's masterpiece 4096 Farben is coming to auction at Sotheby's in New York for the first time in 20 years.

The painting was also the inspiration for the stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral. Read also about the story of its creation, which Gerhard Richter himself described as "a beautiful stroke of luck."

4096 Farben by Gerhard Richter ©Sotheby's

Gerhard Richter was later inspired by this painting to commission a stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral, which was unveiled in 2007 © Jorgen Hendriksen

Art Calendar, 20 April 2023: Gerhard Richter's 1974 masterpiece 4096 Farben is expected to be the sensation in Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction on 18 May 2023 in New York.

Estimated price of $18 million-25 million

According to Kelsey Leonard, Head of Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auctions, "4096 Farben is the last and most ambitious work in Gerhard Richter's Farbtafeln series, which he worked on for almost a decade.

This last painting of the Colour Plate series was also the model for the artist's window in Cologne Cathedral.

Gerhard Richter first came into contact with the concept of the colour panels in 1966 and over the next eight years created works that today rank among the most important conceptual projects of the last century. The artist selected the last work 4096 Farben as the title page of his catalogue raisonné.

Gerhard Richter was later inspired by this painting to commission a stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral, which was unveiled in 2007. This window is an exact replica of 4096 colours of the painting - with about 11,000 glass squares in 72 different colours. "I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields."

Gerhard Richter

4096 Colours measures one metre in length and height, making it one of the largest paintings in the series. Most recently, 192 Farben, the first painting of the colour panel created by Richter in 1966, sold at auction at Sotheby's in London for $20.5 million.

"A beautiful stroke of luck" in a Düsseldorf paint shop

Gerhard Richter described his colour panel as "a beautiful stroke of luck" - he got the idea by chance when he was admiring the colour sample cards in a Düsseldorf paint shop and thought they were already perfectly finished paintings. Between 1966 and 1974, Gerhard Richter painted three different series of colour charts, each increasing in complexity and colourfulness. While Richter's first series of colour plates reflected the ready-made quality of industrial colour cards along with the aesthetics of Pop and Minimal Art, by 1971 the artist had abandoned this structure and instead explored a mechanically progressive series of grids containing each colour cell.

In 4096 colours, Richter introduced greys and greens into his primary palette, quadrupling the number of colours represented and creating 1024 different hues. The only work in the series in which Richter repeated each hue four times, 4096 Colours shows the maximum number of colour combinations before the difference between one hue and another dissolves before the viewer's eye.

As a testament to the groundbreaking importance of this series, Richter returned to it more than three decades later in 2007 by expanding it with 4900 Colours - now in the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris - and his famous Cologne Cathedral window. 4096 Colours is also one of the few paintings from the series still in private hands.

4096 Farben on view in Sotheby's London gallery rooms since 12 April 2023

Auction 18 May 2023 in New York, Sotheby's

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