Gerhard Richter’s Ohne Titel (1970) is a singular and pioneering work, encapsulating a pivotal moment in the artist’s evolving practice. Anticipating the ethereal dynamism of his seminal Wolken (Clouds) series, the present work harmoniously bridges the atmospheric luminosity of these later compositions with the restrained tonality of his Grau (Grey) paintings. Executed during a critical period of artistic exploration, it stands as a testament to Richter’s relentless pursuit of abstraction and his masterful command of surface and depth.

The work combines the blurred greyscale depths of his early photo-paintings with the mottled, non-representational painterly surfaces that would come to define his first Abstrakte Bilder, developed later that decade. These works coincided with other pivotal series, such as his Colour Charts and Red-Blue-Yellow paintings. Its gestural fluidity aligns it with the indeterminate Cloudscapes, Seascapes, and Inpaintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Richter’s Ohne Titel was notably one of nine works spanning his career selected for the 1993–94 group exhibition Art from Germany: A Winter’s Tale at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in Japan, reinforcing its significance within his oeuvre.

Grey – a hue central to Richter’s practice – is elevated to profound conceptual heights in this work. As Richter himself noted, “Grey is a colour – and sometimes, to me, the most important of all.” This painting visualises the liminal space between black and white as deftly as it navigates the divide between representation and abstraction. For Richter, grey transcends its muted, understated appearance, becoming a medium of philosophical and artistic inquiry. He explained its significance: “It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible… But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.”

In a post-war context, grey also served as a powerful tool for Richter, allowing him to articulate the complexities of memory, history, and the ambiguity of perception. Ohne Titel occupies a crucial position in Richter’s oeuvre, encapsulating the dualities that define his practice: representation and abstraction, illusion and reality, control and spontaneity. It is both a meditation on the subtlety of grey and a testament to his relentless experimentation, standing as a bridge between some of his most significant series. A distillation of the conceptual and technical inquiries that have shaped his career, Ohne Titel remains a compelling embodiment of Richter’s pursuit of the in-between, where the material and the immaterial converge.