Grau
Signed Mixed Media

Name: Grau
Brand: Gerhard Richter
Rating: 5 (233 reviews)

Gerhard Richter

Price data unavailable

AAGR (5 years) This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.

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Medium: Mixed Media

Edition size: 60

Year: 1974

Size: H 40cm x W 50cm

Signed: Yes

Format: Signed Mixed Media

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Track auction value trend

The value of Gerhard Richter's Grau (signed) from 1974 is estimated to be worth between £12,500 to £19,000. This mixed media artwork has been sold 9 times at auction since its initial sale on 12th March 2004. In the past five years, the hammer price has ranged from £6,352 to £24,188, with an average annual growth rate of 3%. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 60.

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Auction Results

Auction Date	Auction House	Location
December 2020	Lempertz, Cologne	Germany
June 2019	Lempertz, Cologne	Germany
April 2018	Christie's Paris	France
November 2014	Van Ham Fine Art Auctions	Germany
April 2014	Christie's Paris	France
June 2010	Ketterer Kunst Hamburg	Germany
December 2008	Christie's London	United Kingdom

Meaning & Analysis

Created in 1974, Grau is a mixed media artwork by Gerhard Richter, inspired by his famous Grey Paintings series. Released in a limited edition of 60, the artwork reflects the artist’s grappling with the entangled relationship between reality and representation. Grey Paintings, a series of canvases consisting exclusively of uninterrupted layers of grey oil paint, represent Richter’s period of distrust in the possibility of knowing and representing reality.

Grau confronts the viewer with a representation of the grey surface, unaccompanied by any colourful or figurative details. The subject of the artwork is the colour of the paint and its application itself. Richter’s choice of colour relates to its symbolic force, one aligning with the artist’s growing sense in the early 1970s that painting could never get close to the core of reality and instead only creates its “fictive models”. Grey, according to Richter, is “more than any other colour qualified not to represent anything at all”. As a neutral colour, grey is meant to correspond with a sense of despair over the impossibility of knowing and representing.

Described by the artist as “the most complete ones, which I could imagine”, such artworks as Grau represent Richter’s intellectual restlessness and an ongoing preoccupation with the nature of painting. Grau represents Richter’s exploration of a colour that has been a subject of interest to some of the most highly acclaimed twentieth-century artists, including Alberto Giacommetti, René Magritte or Pablo Picasso. The artwork links Richter to a rich lineage of artists for whom grey became a medium for engaging with the problems of painting.

Hailing from Germany, Gerhard Richter has not been confined to one visual style. A testament to versatility and artistic diversity, Richter's work spans from photorealism to abstraction and conceptual art, and his portfolio is rich in varied media. From creating bold canvases to working on glass to distort the lines between wall-based art and sculpture, Richter has honed in on the blur technique to impart an ambiguity on his creations. To this day, Richter is one of the most recognised artists of the 20th century with his art having been presented in exhibitions worldwide. His global impact underscores his legacy as a trailblazer of artistic exploration.

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