MAY 2026 NEW-YORK AUCTIONS
Gerhard Richter 

 

 

 

Kerze (Candle), 1982

Kerze (Candle), 1982

Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman
Christie’s New-York: 20 May 2026
Estimated: USD 35,000,000 – 50,000,000

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932), Kerze (Candle) | Christie’s

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932)
Kerze (Candle), 1982
Oil on canvas
100.3 x 70.5 cm (39-1/2 x 27-3/4 inches)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘510-1 Richter 1982’ (on the reverse)

In 1982, shortly after Gerhard Richter exhibited his large-scale abstracts to critical acclaim at documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, the artist unveiled a series of radically different paintings that confirmed his position as one of the world’s most important living artists. Kerze is one the these paintings, a discreet series that combines the past and the present, memory and reality. A contemporary intervention in the historic tradition of still-life painting, Richter’s Kerze paintings also reflected the artist’s very personal experiences of living through the destruction of World War II and its aftermath. Held in the personal collection of Marian Goodman, the legendary art dealer and close friend of the artist, for over 40 years, Kerze represents not only an important contribution to history of twentieth-century painting, but also one of the most enduring partnerships in contemporary art.

Enveloped in solitude, the solitary candle is a totem to the artist’s ability to convey emotion in the most controlled and reductive way. A pale wax candle is located in a simple white candle holder, making it one of only three surviving Kerze paintings to show a candle in full. Set on a deep sill, the candle is bathed in a soft light that permeates through an unseen window to the left, creating a dramatic interplay of light and shadow. The candle occupies the space where these two worlds converge; half bathed in light from the window, half enveloped in shadow, it belongs in both.

Gerhard Richter in his studio, 1984. Photo: Benjamin Katz. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-kunst, Bonn.
Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2026 (24042026).

This duality is prevalent throughout Richter’s work. Much of his career has been spent examining the role of painting in an age where photography has become the dominant mode of visual communication, a medium particularly associated with truth and reality in opposition to painting’s fictive tradition. In addition, as someone who spent his childhood growing up in eastern Germany during World War II, before moving to the West in 1961, Richter has experienced his own personal dualities, including mortality and the transience of life, together with the conflicting political philosophies of tyranny and freedom. Although Richter only painted a total of 27 Kerze paintings, the symbolism of the candle became one of the most important in his career.

“I was fascinated by these motifs. I felt protected  because these motifs are so art-historically charged, and I no longer needed to say that I painted them for myself. The motifs were covered by this styled composition, out-of-focus quality, and perfection. So beautifully painted, they take away the fear” 

The “styled composition” quality that Richter refers to is a development of the artist’s iconic “photorealist” paintings with which he first gained international acclaim beginning in the early 1960s. Using an everyday photograph as his source image (often a family photograph or one torn from a magazine), at first Richter renders a near perfect copy of the image. Then, while the paint was still wet, he drags a dry brush over the surface, disrupting the clarity of the images while maintaining the integrity of its subject matter. “I do not blur my pictures to make a representation seem more artistic through lack of clarity or to give my style and individual note,” Richter maintains, “I rather equalize, neutralize what is depicted, attempt to retain the anonymous gloss of the photograph, to replace the craftsmanly-artistic with the technical” (G. Richter, quoted in Heiner Stachelhaus, ‘Doubts in the Face of Reality: The Paintings of Gerhard Richter’, Studio International 184, Sept. 1972, p. 78). In the case of the present work, Richter used a photograph of a candle taken in the artist’s studio specifically for the purpose of this painting.

For centuries artists have used candles to symbolize many things including faith, hope, life, mortality, enlightenment, and knowledge. Shifting from a device that symbolized the divine presence in medieval art, such as in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Saints Genevieve and Apollonia (1506, National Gallery, London), to a key tool for showcasing dramatic chiaroscuro, as in Francesco de Zurbarán’s The Penitent Magdalen (circa 1635-38, Museo Nacional de San carlos, Mexico City), during the Dutch Golden Age the candle had come to represent the instability of life, as in Rembrandt’s The Money Changer (1627, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie), before being used to depict the triumph of reason during the Enlightenment, such as Joseph Wright of Derby’s, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).

Georges de la Tour, The Penitent Magdalen, circa 1640. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

However, for Richter the candle has a much more personal historical resonance, as he recalled in 1995, when he produced a monumental Kerze painting to mark the 50th anniversary of the allied bombings of Dresden, “at first it was only intended to look pretty… but later a politically useful statement was also found in the picture… [as] candles had always been an important symbol for the GDR, as a silent protest against the regime… it was a strange feeling to see that a small picture of candles was turning into something completely different, something that I had never intended. Because, as I was painting it, it neither had this unequivocal meaning nor was it intended to be anything like a street picture. It sort of ran away from me and became something over which I no longer had control… When I painted the candles I wasn’t thinking of February the 13th [the allied bombing of Dresden during World War II] but I did experience feelings to do with contemplation, remembering, silence and death” (G. Richter quoted in D. Elgar and H.U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter – TEXT: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-2007, London 2009, pp. 320 and 354).

Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 28 July 1830, circa 1830-1831. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

This particular Kerze painting has been in the personal collection of Marian Goodman, the legendary dealer and longtime friend of the artist, for the past four decades. She acquired the painting following an exhibition at the Max  Hetzler Gallery in Stuttgart the previous year in which four of Richter’s Kerzen paintings were shown for the first time, alongside a selection of his new large-scale abstract works from 1982. As with many of the 20th Century’s greatest artistic statements, none sold initially. Goodman, however, spotted their potential almost immediately. At the time, the art world was dominated by a new generation of Neo-Expressionist painters including Jean-Michael Basquiat and Julian Schnabel in the U.S. and Georg Baselitz and A. R. Penck in Germany. However, Goodman saw something different in Richter’s work, “[He] was a bit drowned out by all these loud, expressionist voices,” she remembered. “So I wrote him a letter just telling him how much I loved the work and maybe I could make a difference… everything started from there.” (quoted in E. Day, “Marian Goodman: gallerist with the golden touch,” The Guardian, October 12, 2014, online [accessed: 4/4/2026]).

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

Thus began a partnership that lasted nearly forty years. As one of New York’s leading gallerists, Goodman was pivotal in introducing key European artists such as Richter, Joseph Beuys, and Marcel Broodthaers to audiences in the United States. Known for her highly sophisticated eye and her passionate advocacy for her artists, under her guidance Richter established himself as one of the world’s most important living contemporary painters. Richter also identified a partner too who had the ability to help him develop his career as he wanted to develop. Of their first meeting in 1983, Richter recalled, “I was impressed that she came alone. Other dealers come with another person or an entourage to support them. Marian is a presence. She is wise. She has courage” (quoted in P. Schjeldahl, “Dealership,” The New Yorker, January 26, 2004, online [accessed: 4/4/2026]).

Painted in 1982, Kerze dates from a significant period in Richter’s career. He turned 50-years-old that year, and along with the associated feelings of impermanence often associated with that milestone, he also experienced a remarkable resurgence of creativity. In addition to his Kerze paintings, he also began painting his large-scale squeegee abstract  paintings, a body of work that would sustain him for much of the rest of his career. But it is with paintings such as the present work that we get a more complete picture of Richter the artist. Hauntingly beautiful and deeply personal, it is with paintings such as Kerze that we can see the full scope of Richter’s belief in the power of painting.

 

 

Mohn (Poppy), 1995

Mohn (Poppy), 1995

Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman
Christie’s New-York: 20 May 2026
Estimated: USD 14,000,000 – 18,000,000

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932), Mohn (Poppy) | Christie’s

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932)
Mohn (Poppy), 1995
Oil on canvas
200×140 cm (78-3/4 x 55-1/8 inches)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘830-1 Richter 1995’ (on the reverse)

Gem-like speckles of glimmering ultramarine and crimson paint shimmer out from beneath blurred layers of blue, yellow, and green in Gerhard Richter’s Mohn. Painted in 1995, a seminal year in the German artist’s oeuvre, the present work exemplifies the polychromatic and technical complexity that define Richter’s mature abstractions, which the artist himself has described as “more adult.” Mohn, meaning poppy, is notable for its vibrant red notes. While Richter employed bright reds among his abstract paintings of the early 1980s, he later adopted a more somber, monochromatic gray palette. His important 18. Oktober 1977 series of 1988 marked a creative caesura in Richter’s oeuvre.

“I realize that these pictures set a new standard, set a challenge for me. I may be deceiving myself. It’s all still too fresh. But one thing I have realized; it’s hard for me to go on painting.”

Following the 18. Oktober 1977 series, documenting the deaths of three militant activists in Germany, Richter entered a creative crisis. The following years witness an exceptional period of development; Richter adopts the use of the spatula as counterpart to his squeegee in 1991. “Scraping off. For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my paintings but scrape off, pile on, and then remove again,” Richter laments in a September 1992 diary entry. Following several more years of determined struggle with painting, Richter reaches a breakthrough in 1995, with his development culminating in Mohn.

Claude Monet, The Japanese Bridge, 1918-1924. Musée Marmottan, Paris.

The present work witnesses Richter utilizing his new scraping tool with methodical precision. The artist meticulously balances the horizontal thrust of his squeegee with the vertical pull of his spatula, establishing a complex compositional balance as he wields his two tools. Richter attacked the left side of the canvas with verve, exposing myriad underlayers of vibrant pigment while simultaneously creating a thrilling impastoed effect. The rigor evoked on the left side contrasts with the tranquility on the right, where Richter’s excavating spatula gives way to the mesmeric blurring effect of his squeegee. Here, Richter’s electric top layers of pigment meld together into a trance-like oblivion. Richter’s major traveling retrospective the prior year, originating at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in September before travelling to Bonn, Stockholm, and then Madrid, established without doubt Richter as one of the most significant painters alive. On a biographical level, Richter’s son Moritz was born January 6, 1995, which the artist celebrated with a series of blurred color portraits of his new wife Sabine holding their newborn. While recalling Richter’s earlier 1965 painting Tante Marianne, a painted grayscale portrait after a photograph showing the young artist in the arms of his aunt, Richter’s S. mit Kind paintings are in color, revealing the artist’s newfound chromatic vibrancy, which revives in his Tulips paintings of the same year.

Vincent van Gogh, Poppy Fields, 1890. Kunstmuseum, Hague.

Mohn continues the floral motif which Richter explores in his Tulips. Poppies hold symbolic significance in both poetic and historical contexts—the flower is used to commemorate World War I in Commonwealth countries, while in Germanic poetry the flower’s ephemerality and excess of color is celebrated in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Mohn poems and used as a potent symbol of Holocaust remembrance in Paul Celan’s collection Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), first published in 1952. In poems like Schlaf-Mohn, Rilke emphasizes the poppy’s intoxicating effects, leading to exhaustion. Mohn elaborates on this sense of intoxication—the artist here builds layers upon layers of paint onto his canvas, which he then blurs and scrapes to create a tableau of cacophonic exuberance. Richter’s intent is similar to intoxication, presenting to his viewer a novel experience which poisons one’s perception of reality.

“I don’t mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing, I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Poppy, 1928. Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Celan’s poetic project parallels Richter’s own longstanding meditation on the collective guilt and national memories surrounding World War II. His early photograph-derived paintings Uncle Rudi (1965) and Aunt Marianne (1965) reflect upon his uncle’s association with the Nazi regime and his aunt’s murder in a concentration camp, while his late Birkenau series (2014) reckons with issues of identity and collective memory in post-World War II Germany, confronting whether and how art is able to address the Holocaust. Mohn thus derives great significance in its connection to many of Richter’s most important works, dwelling in a more abstract manner on themes which the German artist has spent decades meditating on.

Remembrance and historical memory would have been front of mind for Richter as he was working on the present work. A media furor erupted in 1995 over the planned removal of the artist’s 17. Oktober 1976 series from their long-term display at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main after the series was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Likewise, Richter pondered the series anew following the birth of his son in 1995. The artist viewed the S. mit Kind paintings as a private counterpart to the cycle: “the Baader-Meinhof cycle [17. Oktober 1976] consists of distant, hopeless pictures of death in the face of a utopia that has deteriorated into violence. In view of this tarnished utopia, S. mit Kind are paintings that arose out of private happiness, but also speak of the untruthfulness of everyday images and their necessary destruction, and of decay and death” (quoted in D. Elger, op. cit., p. 16). Mohn demonstrates Richter’s careful balancing of his private happiness and continual dwelling on decay and destruction within his celebrated abstract mode.

 

Abstraktes Bild, 2008

Abstraktes Bild, 2008

Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman
Christie’s New-York: 20 May 2026
Estimated: USD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932), Abstraktes Bild | Christie’s

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild, 2008
Oil on canvas
82.6 x 112.1 cm (32-1/2 x 44-1/8 inches)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘903-6 Richter R. 2008’ (on the reverse)

Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild of 2008 is a profound reflection on the passage of time. The painting’s seeming spontaneity, evoked by the vibrant fluorescence of the top green layer, belies the incredible amount of time and energy which the German artist wrought upon the work. Just one year after painting the present work, Richter declared that “a painting can help us think something that goes beyond this senseless existence. That’s something art can do” (quoted in A. Borchardt-Hume, “‘Dreh Dich Nicht Im’: Don’t turn around; Richter’s Paintings of the Late 1980s,” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2011, p. 169). Abstraktes Bild is a mature reflection on time and existence, revealing Richter at his most contemplative and reflective.

Across a period years, Richter continually engaged this canvas, adding and subtracting pigment from the work’s surface as he simultaneously pushed and pulled paint across the surface of the tableau. The present work exemplifies this extended process, each visible layer revealing an alternative ending or possible solution to the work. In-progress photographs reveal the gradual evolution of the work. The first state is a photorealistic painting of a misty alpine scene, inspired by Richter’s alpine retreat in Sils, Switzerland. Richter then employed his signature blur to the composition, abstracting the imagery into a hazy white tableau reminiscent of his pure white paintings. The final state exhibits radical alterations, demonstrating the artist’s constant strive towards new artistic heights, challenging his own artistic orthodoxy.

The present work in progress.

Richter slowly refined his meticulous process for making the Abstraktes Bilder over his decades-long career. As he noted, “a picture like this is painted in different layers, separated by intervals of time. The first layer mostly represents the background, which has a photographic, illusionist look to it, though done without using a photograph. This first, smooth, soft-edged surface is like a finished picture… I partly destroy, partly add to it… at that stage the whole thing looks very spontaneous, but in between there are long intervals of time. It is a highly planned kind of spontaneity” (quoted in C. Moeineau, “The Blow-Up, Primary Colours and Duplications,” in op. cit., p. 131). From the mid-1980s, Richter began to engage his now-iconic squeegee technique on his abstract works, and from the early 1990s the spatula. These two implements engage in the systematic eradication of the artist’s hand, creating an abstract painting devoid of gestural or expressionist remnants. “What we are given instead is a temporal depth: the summation of several units of moments,” writes the art historian Camille Moeineau (ibid., p. 131).

The present work reveals Richter’s emergence from a period of more reserved coloration, the artist instead returning to the vibrant palette first seen in his works from the early 1980s. The uppermost layers thus recall the artist’s earliest mature abstract works. Meanwhile, the underlayers express the subdued whites and grays which held increasing prominence in his work from the late 1990s, as Richter deepened his formal engagement with the German Romantic tradition. By obscuring his more recent style with the colors of his first works, Richter poignantly provides bookends to his legendary career across one work.

Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée IX, 1983. Collection FRAC Normandie, on permanent loan at the Musée des impressionnismes, Giverny. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

The interaction between the surface and the depth of the Abstraktes Bilder represent one of the most enduring and powerful of Richter’s painterly effects. Abstraktes Bild (2008) occupies a pivotal position within Richter’s sustained engagement with abstraction. The painting encapsulates the artist’s iterative method. Its cycles of construction and erasure yield a dense temporal record which resists any single resolution. At once chromatically assertive and structurally measured, the work reconciles the exuberance of Richter’s earlier abstract vocabulary with the cooler restraint that characterizes his later production. Through its layered complexity and quiet internal equilibrium, the present work is a compelling testament to Richter’s ongoing commitment to painting as a site of critical inquiry and sustained reflection.

 

Abstraktes Bild, 2009

Abstraktes Bild, 2009

Breaking Ground: The Private Collection of Marian Goodman
Christie’s New-York: 20 May 2026
Estimated: USD 3,500,000 – 5,500,000

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932), Abstraktes Bild | Christie’s

GERHARD RICHTER (B. 1932)
Abstraktes Bild, 2009
Oil on canvas
101.9 x 101.9 cm (40-1/8 x 40-1/8 inches)
Signed, inscribed and dated ‘910-5 Richter 2009’ (on the reverse)

Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (2009) is an exceptional late work by the celebrated German painter, one of only a few works where ethereal white almost completely blankets the canvas. The work witnesses Richter at his most elemental and metaphysical, achieving through his most celebrated technique a poignant and philosophical reflection on art and nature. Abstraktes Bild emerges from Richter’s decades-long interest in landscape, and exhibits the artist blending the two genres, landscape and abstraction, into a singular painting.

“If the Abstract paintings show my reality,
then the landscapes and still lifes show my yearning.” 

 Opaque layers of white coat underlying fields of green, blue, and red like veils of mist and snow against a verdant mountaintop in Abstraktes Bild. The intricate movement of the paint across the surface of the canvas, vertical and horizontal swipes which waver and dip, in contradistinction to the artist’s more common steady horizontal movement of the squeegee, reveals the more naturalistic undercurrents of the present work.

“I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich.”

The present work potently reflects this connection, the dominant white palette with hints of green undergrowth particularly evoking Friedrich’s Morning Mist in the Mountains (1808, Thüringer Landesmuseum Heidecksburg).

Caspar David Friedrich, Morning Mist in the Mountains, 1807-1808. Thüringer Landesmuseum Heidecksburg, Rudolstadt.

Richter revitalizes and reinterprets old motifs across his oeuvre, reviving series from previous decades into new forms. The present work thus finds its genesis in the long series of landscapes that the artist began in 1989, the first year he began to take yearly sojourns to the alpine village Sils in the Upper Engadin region of Switzerland. This faraway locale brought him in direct contact with the dramatic landscapes which initiated the Romantic movement and enthralled the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who maintained a cottage in Sils.

Discussing the long gestation of Richter’s white paintings, the curator Martin Germann identifies as particularly important two landscapes from 1999, Gehöft (Farm) and Schnee (Snow), which inaugurate for the coming millennia Richter’s fascination with the subject. Germann writes that “what these two landscapes share is the absence of any pictorial beyond. What is foregrounded is the snow, and with it nature itself… as Dieter Schwarz notes, Farm (and Snow) anticipate the all-white paintings of the end of the first decade of the century” (M. Germann, “the Painting of Gerhard Richter on the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025, p. 200).

John Nash, “Over The Top”. 1st Artists’ Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917, 1918. Imperial War Museum, London.

Richter’s Alpine retreat brought him close to the Sublime ideal first articulated in Friedrich’s paintings then parroted in Nietzsche’s philosophy. An early ardent proponent of the Sublime, Mark Rothko, cited these two Germans as foundational to his metaphysical conception. Discussing Rothko’s Sublime, Richter noted: “Certainly, I too want that quantity in general for my work, and to touch the world. But my interest only parallels Rothko; I am not influenced. His metaphysical aspirations are found in all great art. Besides, the mystery and incomprehensibility of Rothko’s paintings are based on the specificity of the structure, the transcendental effects and the viewer’s contemplation. The aesthetic experience in my abstract paintings is not metaphysical in the sense of being religious. Only the structure of my works is so complicated and difficult that they are incomprehensible also. If you want, you may call it metaphysical” (quoted in “Interview with Mark Rosenthal, 1998,” in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist, eds., op. cit., p. 330).

Claude Monet, La Cathédrale de Rouen. Le Portail et la Tour Saint-Romain, effet du matin, 1893. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Germann describes how over the decades Richter spent refining his abstract paintings, “the rhythmically recurring periods of closing, sealing, and opening the canvas spread over the next thirty years refined them, repeatedly touching on aspects of monochrome painting—as seen in the white paintings of 2009, for example—while negating any clear categorization as a colored palimpsest” (M. Germann, op. cit., p. 204). The present work is thus a final result of Richter’s long career spent querying abstraction. The gleaming white top layer of the work almost disguises the chromatic complexity awaiting underneath. While summering for the last time in Sils, Nietzsche began work on his final work, his autobiography Ecce Homo. In his preface, the philosopher writes, “Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks—the seeking—out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban” (Ecce Homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, London, 1911, p. 3). Paralleling Nietzsche, Richter’s Abstraktes Bild represents the artist’s own discoveries in the mountain peaks, revealing in an abstracted landscape his own vision of the metaphysical.