Gerhard Richter’s iconic painting, 4096 Farben, is set to be auctioned at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in New York on May 18, 2023, with an estimated value of $18-25 million. The work is the culmination of Richter’s color field paintings, which were famously inspired by a trip to the hardware store in the mid-1960s, where he was beguiled by the paint samples, seeing them as perfect readymades for painting.
In 1966, Richter gestured towards these paint samples in his first color field work, creating little blocks of color separated by a thin white grid, just as in those samples, or thin rectangular charts. In 1974, he created 4096 Farben, which he considered to be the pinnacle of that style and was the last in his Color Charts series. The painting, composed of 4,096 individual bits of color, immediately calls to mind that supremely modern image of pixels and has an odd but striking parallel to Beeple’s groundbreaking NFT, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days.
But 4096 Farben served as the foundation for a much more traditional project, the stained-glass window at the Cologne Cathedral. Richter discovered that by adding grays and greens into his primary palette, he could conjure up 1,024 distinct hues. Any effort to push the colors further would result in too negligible a shift. To make 4096 Farben, Richter repeated each of the 1,024 hues four times, representing the “maximum number of color combinations before the difference between one hue and another dissolves,” as revealed in a Sotheby’s press release.
“4096 Farben is the last and, undoubtedly, the most ambitious of Gerhard Richter’s Color Chart paintings––a series that not only occupied the artist for almost a decade but which inspired him to truly test the boundaries of abstraction within his oeuvre,” said Kelsey Leonard, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in New York, in the press release.
The auction by Gerhard Richter record was most recently broken last October when his color field painting, 192 Farben, sold for $20.5 million. The artist’s use of color in his works is renowned, and his paintings have fetched high prices at auctions worldwide. 4096 Farben’s estimated value of $18-25 million is indicative of the high regard in which the art world holds Richter’s work.
Gerhard Richter’s 4096 Farben is a highly anticipated piece for the upcoming auction at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in New York. It is a culmination of Richter’s color field paintings and is regarded as the pinnacle of that style. The painting’s use of 4,096 individual bits of color has made it an iconic piece of Richter’s oeuvre and has also served as the foundation for a traditional project, the stained-glass window at the Cologne Cathedral. The painting’s estimated value of $18-25 million is indicative of the high regard in which the art world holds Richter’s work, and it is expected to fetch a high price at the auction.