Cage Grid I Single Part H
Signed Print

A prominent feature of the Cage Grid series, Cage Grid I Single Part H vaunts the creative prowess of Richter. Product of the artist’s uncharacteristic departure, in the early 1970s, from a strictly photographic or ‘realist’ style, the work is a bright assemblage of pastel-like colours ranging from sunflower yellows and pastoral greens through to vibrant pinks and purples. Like Cage f.ff II and Cage f.ff III, the work is testament to Richter’s semi-experimental creative process - a methodology that he himself has referred to as the ‘death’ of traditional painting itself.

Rooted in Richter’s fierce disavowal of his socialist realist training, this print bears visual traces of the wooden squeegees used to create the original painting it references - one of a number of 2006 works that Richter named his Cage paintings. Dragged across the canvas surface in a purposeful manner that nonetheless allows for the possibility of productive mistakes and ‘happy accidents’, these squeegees have allowed Richter to move away from the representational (visible in such works as Kerze (1988) and Elisabeth II (1966))  towards the non-representational - an artistic methodology referenced by his more recent artistic forays into Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or ‘coming to terms with the past’.