Schweizer Alpen I - A1 - B3 (complete set)
Schweizer Alpen I - A1 - B3 (complete set)
Signed Print
Gerhard Richter
70 x 70cm, Edition of 300, Screenprint, 1969
£9,000-£13,500
$17,000-$25,000 Market Value Indicator
$17,000-$25,000 Market Value Indicator
¥80,000-¥120,000 Market Value Indicator
€10,500-€16,000 Market Value Indicator
$90,000-$140,000 Market Value Indicator
¥1,890,000-¥2,830,000 Market Value Indicator
$12,000-$18,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Schweizer Alpen I – A1 – B3 is the complete set of six screenprints by Gerhard Richter, produced in 1969 in an edition of three hundred. The first and more widely distributed of the two Swiss Alps editions, each print presents a close-up view of Alpine mountain terrain – rock face, snow, and shadow – translated through the screenprint medium into stark, graphic planes of black, grey, and white.
Produced in the same year as the rarer Series II, the Schweizer Alpen I set represents the more accessible of the two editions and the one through which the series reached its broadest audience. An edition of three hundred is, for Richter, relatively open; it signals a work intended for wide distribution at the moment of its making.
The visual approach is consistent across both series: close-up Alpine photography – rock face, compacted snow, high-altitude ice formation – is reduced by the screenprint process to three or four flat tonal values. No sky or horizon appears; the viewer is placed entirely within the mountain surface. The diagonal energy of snow ridges crossing grey rock faces gives each composition a strong sense of geological force, the landscape encountered as texture and pattern rather than as distant spectacle.
Series I provides the essential foundation for understanding Richter's Schweizer Alpen project as a whole. The six-print complete set gives the fullest account of how the works operate in sequence – each composition a variation on the same material and visual approach, the differences between prints emerging through shifts in the balance of rock, snow, and shadow across the mountain surface.
