Wolken (Clouds)
Wolken (Clouds)
Signed Print
Gerhard Richter
£7,500-£11,000
$14,000-$21,000 Value Indicator
$13,000-$19,000 Value Indicator
¥70,000-¥100,000 Value Indicator
€8,500-€12,500 Value Indicator
$70,000-$110,000 Value Indicator
¥1,260,000-¥1,850,000 Value Indicator
$9,500-$14,000 Value Indicator
AAGR (5 years) This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.
There aren't enough data points on this work for a comprehensive result. Please speak to a specialist by making an enquiry.
Medium: Lithograph
Edition size: 300
Year: 1969
Size: H 55cm x W 50cm
Signed: Yes
Format: Signed Print
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Auction Results
| Auction Date | Auction House | Artwork | Hammer Price | Return to Seller | Buyer Paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sotheby's London - United Kingdom | Wolken (Clouds) - Signed Print | ||||
| May 2021 | Stahl Auktion House - Germany | Wolken (Clouds) - Signed Print | |||
| October 2019 | Van Ham Fine Art Auctions - Germany | Wolken (Clouds) - Signed Print | |||
| September 2018 | Stahl Auktion House - Germany | Wolken (Clouds) - Signed Print | |||
| June 2018 | Ketterer Kunst Hamburg - Germany | Wolken (Clouds) - Signed Print | |||
| January 2018 | Lempertz, Cologne - Germany | Wolken (Clouds) - Signed Print | |||
| June 2017 | Ketterer Kunst Hamburg - Germany | Wolken (Clouds) - Signed Print |
Meaning & Analysis
Part of the German artist Gerhard Richter’s Atlas series, Wolken (Clouds) is a signed lithograph print. It was issued in an edition of 300 in 1969 - a crucial stage in the early part of the artist's career - and is an archetypal example of his so-called ‘photo paintings’.
The same image as that which also appears in Richter’s 1969 print Wolke (Cloud), Wolken (Clouds) is a crucial example of the artist’s unique visual style, developed in large part during the 1960s, and emblematic of an important, life-changing period of Richter’s career. Escaping from Dresden, East Germany to the West German city of Düsseldorf within just weeks of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Richter was finally free; challenging his own origins in ‘socialist realist’ art, Richter would respond to the new, commodity-driven culture around him by co-founding a bold new art movement. Its name? Capitalist Realism.
Despite its photorealist qualities, Wolken (Clouds) makes a point of bringing our attention to the abstract, even non-referential tendencies of artworks focused on the depiction of the natural world. Around a decade later, during the late 1970s, Richter bagan creating abstract works with large-scale ‘squeegees’, later combining photography and abstraction in his so-called Übermalungen - or ‘overpainted’ photographs. As such, this image can be read as a precursor to these conceptual and stylistic developments of the artist’s œuvre. Comprising an image of a cloudy sky - of the kind one might see from a plane window - the print’s focal point is a bright white horizon line. Sandwiched between an upper and lower layer of cloud, Richter’s image is doubly his own: it was painted after a holiday photograph, which Richter placed in his so-called ‘Atlas’.
