(born in Dresden in 1932)
Portrait Günther Uecker, 1968, signed and dated Richter 68 on the reverse, graphite and oil on primed canvas, 50 x 38 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection Dusseldorf
Sale Ketterer, Munich, 5 December 2006, lot 324A
Private Collection Greece
Sies + Höke, Dusseldorf (label)
Private Collection, Germany

Exhibited:
Sies + Höke, Dusseldorf, Gerhard Richter. Drawings/Zeichnungen 1963 – 2020, 28 January - 26 February 2022

Literature:
Dieter Schwarz, Gerhard Richter. Drawings 1964–1999, Catalogue Raisonné, Dusseldorf 2000, no.68/13, p. 197
Stefan Gronert, Hubertus Butin, Gerhard Richter, Portraits Ostfildern-Ruit 2006, p. 95
Sies + Höke (Ed.), Gerhard Richter. Drawings/Zeichnungen 1963–2020, Dusseldorf 2022, p. 10 and 142, p. 49 with col.-ill.

From 5 to 15 April 1968, Gerhard Richter exhibited alongside his studio neighbour Günther Uecker at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. The project was called "14 x 14", their action "Life in the Museum". Richter and Uecker moved their studios into the open spaces of the Kunsthalle and staged a series of playful, anarchic actions in the bourgeois ambience of distinguished villas.

Günther Uecker kept his striped pyjamas on all day, symbolically storming the exhibition centre with an oversized metal nail used as a battering ram, or dragging it through the streets for days on end, while Richter crouched against the front of a building and offered cheap reproductions of his new paintings to passers-by. In another action, the two set off on a joint "Alpine flight" in front of Richter's new Alpine paintings. Gerhard Richter and Günther Uecker had a friendly relationship. "Our studios were next door to each other, and as he [Günther Uecker] had a lot of visitors, I sometimes had to lock myself in so that people wouldn't just pop in on me."
1968 is the exact year in which the work Portrait of Günther Uecker was created, painted with graphite and oil on primed canvas. Although painted portraits are an important part of Richter's oeuvre, as drawings they are extremely rare, making this work a notable exception. The underlying geometric squaring may indicate that Richter was working from a photographic model here. In contrast to the craft-like, regulated quality of painting, and to its official status of concluding the stages of the working process, Richter's drawing stands for something that cannot be integrated into a controlled process. This genre represents the antithesis of painting in its improvised formulation. Richter emphasised on several occasions that he could not plan drawings, that they simply happened and that they were only possible at certain moments. The fact that Richter signed the work on the reverse proves that it has the same final status of a completed painting.

Depicted with the head turned away from the viewer to the left in a lost profile, the figure foreshadows the painting of Betty, Richter's daughter, one of his most famous works, created 20 years later. As with Betty, there is almost no individualisation in this portrait; personalising facial features are not visible and the background is undifferentiated. The question arises of whether these background figures fulfil the function of romantic pictorial symbolism, directing the viewer's gaze into the distance as a projection or even as representatives of the viewer in the picture. However, the squaring deviates from this romantic model, as does the impasto application of grey oil paint on the left back of the head, which raises the drawing to a new level of differentiated surface structure. Instead, Richter demonstrates here the supposed opposites of abstraction and realism.

“One of the earliest artist portraits to be mentioned is that of
Günther Uecker from 1964, whom Richter also portrayed four years later
in a work in which Uecker appears compositionally turned away on a squared sheet, thus anticipating Betty's view.”
Stefan Gronert