War Cut II

In this print, Richter does little to index his accretive, staged process of ‘layering’ - a central part of the artist’s creative process. Consisting of a bold, bright panel of red paint, complete with a right ‘flash’ of green and yellow hues, the traces of Richter’s squeegees - home-made by his assistants - are scarcely visible. Instead, here Richter creates a mysterious, impenetrable image that references its nature as a photographic ‘section’ of a much larger, much more complex painting. Unlike the bright, complex assemblage that is Abstraktes Bild (P1) - painted just several years later - there is a seriousness to this work that references its re-use and re-working in Richter’s 2004 monograph, War Cut.

The monograph War Cut, from which this print was taken, has its origins in May of 2002. During this month, Richter took photographs of individual sections of his 1987 painting, War Cut. Repurposing them, Richter interspersed these 216 images with another 216 texts taken from the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung. The texts are significant in that they were taken from editions of the newspaper published on the 20th and 21st of March 2003 - dates that marked the beginning of the so-called Iraq War.