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Colour charts

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 15th October 2008

Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours
Serpentine Gallery, until 16 November

Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1940–58
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1, until 12 December

At the Serpentine is an exhibition of little squares of colour, randomly arranged in grids. There are 49 paintings on show, each one composed of four panels consisting of 25 squares each. They are painted in enamel on something synthetic called Aludibond, on boards or plates attached directly to the wall. The colour combinations are selected by chance through a specially developed computer programme, and the initial idea for the work was sparked by the industrial colour charts produced by paint manufacturers. Gerhard Richter (born 1932) has been making paintings based on colour charts since 1966, and, after a lot of trying, he has finally sold the idea to a credulous world.

It seems that Richter himself has a high estimation of these pictures. He is quoted in the publicity material as claiming, ‘They are the only paintings which tell no story. Even abstract paintings are like photos of a non-existent reality, of an unknown jungle. Here there is no illusion. They say nothing and evoke no association. They are simply there, pure visual subjects.’ What arrogant tosh. It’s the sort of comment clever artists think they can get away with nowadays because nobody knows any better in this sorry culture of ignorance. Richter pontificates as if he’d just invented geometric abstraction, when it’s all been done before over the past 100 years, time and time again. Yet people in the art world who should know better treat him as if he were some kind of guru. Admittedly he has done some vaguely interesting work with blurring and distorting in his more figurative paintings (oh, yes, this great master turns his hand to all sorts and types of art), but his chief distinction at the moment lies in being overrated.

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