Cage Grid I Single Part O

The Cage Grid prints derive from Richter's Cage paintings (2006), six large-scale abstract canvases produced in response to his long-standing engagement with John Cage's ideas about chance, silence and the abandonment of compositional control. The squeegee method used in both the paintings and the prints generates marks that are consistent in their production process but unpredictable in their specific outcomes: Richter described the squeegee as a means of displacing his own hand – a tool that makes painting without, in the traditional sense, a painter deciding.

Single Part O presents one cell of the sixteen-panel grid in isolation. The surface is dense with squeegee activity: greens in several registers – teal, mint, olive – concentrated at the left, with yellow cutting in from the right and white appearing as bright vertical smears across the field. Black anchors certain areas, creating depth against the lighter tones. The vertical striations record the direction of the squeegee's passage, and where layers intersect the paint builds into a richly varied texture. As a standalone work, the panel transforms a grid fragment into a self-sufficient composition. Richter produced the sixteen panels as individual prints as well as a complete set; the individual edition of 4 is considerably rarer than the complete set of 16.