Schweizer Alpen I - B1

Gestural, semi-abstract, and entertaining only a tenuous link to its subject matter, Schweizer Alpen I - B1 (1969) is one of a number of landscape works completed by Richter during the late 1960s. Unlike the artist’s semi-realist ‘photo paintings’, such as Wolken (Clouds) (1969) or Seestück I (1969), also completed in the same year, Richter situates his depiction of the natural world towards the abstract end of the spectrum. This decision, he argued, was to explore the abstraction inherent to the natural world - a site onto which the viewer themselves is free to project meaning. Like many of his early landscapes, Schweizer Alpen I - B1 borrows motifs from Romantic painting. Invoking the sublime via the motif of the mountain, the print conjures reminiscences of Caspar David Friedrich and his instantly recognisable painting, Die Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wandered above the Sea of Fog) (1818).

Commenting on his relationship to the natural world, and to romantic landscape painting in general, Richter once commented that contemporary society lacks ‘the spiritual foundation that supported romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of “God’s omnipresence in nature”. For us, everything is empty.’ This emptiness, one could argue, is referenced by the semi-referential, semi-abstracted nature of the print. Blurring the rugged contours gouged by glaciers, the viscerality of a higher presence - of a tangible sense of nature’s unstoppable power to carve up landscapes and to literally ‘move mountains’ - is lost or concealed.