Owen Fox Looking Outwards 9

In this post I’ll be looking at this Gerhard Richter painting, entitled 4900 colors, from this Looking Outwards post. in the original post, the author pointed out that even though every color in this piece was chosen at random, the painting still seems to evoke something. I agree, and I think that the way people can find patterns in things that are totally random is really interesting. In this painting in particular, the white squares look like the outline of some sort of object to me, and I think that by curating random elements so that some of them contrast in neat ways with eachother, artists can create very evocative works of art through random processes.

I also think it’s interesting that this piece, with each square painted at random, is indistinguishable from paintings where the artist chose colors deliberately. This kind of serialized art could potentially be made without an artist at all, and that’s cool to see in a very ego-driven medium.

Richter’s work can be found here.