September
September
Signed Print
Gerhard Richter
66 x 90cm, Edition of 40, Digital Print, 2009
£45,000-£70,000
$80,000-$130,000 Market Value Indicator
$80,000-$130,000 Market Value Indicator
¥400,000-¥620,000 Market Value Indicator
€50,000-€80,000 Market Value Indicator
$470,000-$730,000 Market Value Indicator
¥9,450,000-¥14,700,000 Market Value Indicator
$60,000-$90,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
September is a digital print by Gerhard Richter, made in 2009. The work reproduces Richter's 2005 oil painting of the same name – a depiction of the south tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, rendered in pale blue, warm ochre, and deep charcoal, its form partially obscured by horizontal squeegee marks dragged across the painted surface. This signed edition of 40 is among the most considered and limited of Richter's printed editions.
The 2005 oil painting on which this print is based occupied an unusual position within Richter's practice: it was, for a time, the work he could not resolve. Richter engaged with the subject repeatedly, overpainted, and ultimately arrived at a composition in which the tower form – ochre and brownish-warm against a pale blue sky, dark smoke pressing in from the right – survives only partially beneath horizontal streaks of paint. That partial erasure is not evasion. It is a statement about the limits of photographic representation when confronted with mass catastrophe: the image had circulated everywhere, and yet the image could not contain what had occurred.
The digital print, issued four years later, reproduces that final painted state with precision – the scraped horizontals, the muffled tower, the dark mass encroaching from the right – making the marks of the hand legible at one remove from the original. September sits at the intersection of document and abstraction, event and its aftermath. At an edition of 40, signed by the artist, it is one of the rarest works in Richter's printed catalogue, and one of the most historically weighted.
